[Tutor] help with getting python to run from command prompt on Windows XP

[Marc Tompkins]

On Wed, Jan 14, 2009 at 12:09 PM, wesley chun <wescpy at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> i fully agree with kent's comments/suggestions. you appeared to have
> them do the right thing. fwiw, the only time i run into that error
> after doing the same thing as you is that i'm trying that command in
> an already-opened command window -- i need to close that and open
> another that takes in the changes to the environment variables. but
> you did tell them to reboot, so this shouldn't be your problem.
>
> also, i think (but cannot confirm as i'm on a mac now that) there are
> two PATH env vars... one for the current user and one for all users
> (if you have administrative privileges.
>
>
-  As wesley said, you don't have to reboot anymore (as you did in the old
days when you set environment variables through AUTOEXEC.BAT).  Changes to
environment variables take effect as soon as you click Apply or OK, but they
only affect subsequently-opened command prompts - so if you have a prompt
open, just close it and open a new one.  Rebooting will certainly do the
trick, but if you need to try more than once, this will save a LOT of time.

-  Also as wesley said, there MAY BE two separate PATHs - in my experience,
the user-level one is usually empty and can be deleted to avoid confusion.
If it's _not_ empty, it's usually by mistake... (there may be exceptions,
but every single time I've seen a program that added something to the
user-level path, it's turned out to have been unintentional.)

-  There's also a PATHEXT variable that holds a list of extensions that
Windows should consider executable - its contents should look like this:
".COM;.EXE;.BAT;.CMD;.VBS;.VBE;.JS;.JSE;.WSF;.WSH"  If something has edited
this variable and removed .EXE from the list...

-  The #1 problem I run into in providing telephone support is
misunderstandings over the names of punctuation characters.  I hate to ask,
but is there a possibility of confusion between the colon and semicolon?
(e.g. ":C;\Python26" instead of ";C:\Python26")  That would do it...

-- 
www.fsrtechnologies.com
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