Keeping the Console Open with IDLE

[Gabriel Genellina]

En Fri, 20 Feb 2009 12:39:14 -0200, W. eWatson <notvalid2 at sbcglobal.net>  
escribió:
> Catherine Heathcote wrote:

>>  you need to open a dos prompt before doing the steps above. Go to  
>> start->run and hit "cmd" <enter> without the quotes.
> Something is amiss here. There's the MS Command Prompt, which I'm  
> looking at right now. Yes, it has cd, and so on. I'm also looking at the  
> Python command line window. It allow one to run interactively.

Open a command prompt ("CMD", "Console"), that black window you were  
looking at.
Use the cd command to change directory to wherever your Python script is  
saved.
Execute "python -V" (without the quotes). You should get a response,  
including the Python version number. If you get an error like "command not  
found" or similar, you'll have to use the whole path to python.exe -- try  
with "c:\python25\python -V" (again, no quotes).
Once you know how to launch Python, you can:

a) Enter the interactive interpreter: Just launch Python as above but  
without the -V argument. The prompt is now >>>
You can type Python expressions and the interpreter evaluates them. You  
type 2+3, the interpreter answers 5; you type len("abc"), the interpreter  
answers 3...

b) Or, from the command prompt, you can execute a script by launching  
Python the same way as above, passing the script name as an argument:

c:\foo>python script_name.py

This is what you were looking for - in case of syntax errors or something,  
you can see the output on the console. It stays open because it was open  
*before* you launched Python. Just keep the window open.

See http://docs.python.org/using/windows.html for more info. If Python  
doesn't start just by typing "python", you may want to set your PATH  
environment variable as described there.

-- 
Gabriel Genellina