Determine whether program was started by clicking icon or command line

Benjamin Hell bhell at spamfence.net
Thu Nov 29 16:06:18 EST 2007


Roger Miller wrote:
>> I wonder whether there might be a way to find out how a Python 
>> program was started (in my case in Windows): By double clicking
>> the file or by calling it on the "DOS" command line prompt.
> 
> I'm not sure whether this applies to your situation, but often 
> programs started by clicking an icon are run by pythonw, but when
> started from the command line are run by python. If this is the
> case sys.stdin.fileno() will return -1 in the former case and 0
> in the latter.

Nice idea, but this...

import sys
print sys.stdin.fileno()
raw_input("Press any key to exit")

...
always prints "0" in my case ("DOS", double click in Windows
Explorer, Cygwin shell).

Thanks anyways!

Ben



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