[Python-Dev] Importing packages from command line (original) (raw)

Alex Martelli aleaxit at yahoo.com
Tue Dec 23 04:05:41 EST 2003

On Tuesday 23 December 2003 12:09 pm, Dmitry Vasiliev wrote:

Alex Martelli wrote: >>The main idea is to treating package as a program and run package >>initialization code from command line. The advantage is zipping all >>program modules in one zip archive and running the program from command >>line without unzipping it, like Java's jar's. But this idea need more >>thoughts however... > > Couldn't you use: > python -c "import packagename" > for this purpose even today?

python -c "import sys; sys.path.insert(0, 'module.zip'); import module" Seems ugly... :)

Well, if the zipfile isn't on your sys.path already, then you'd have to insert it explicitly anyway -- surely, even if a switch "-p" to mean import existed, you wouldn't want it to force python to snoop into EVERY zipfile around?!

PYTHONPATH=module.zip python -c "import module"

is one way you might express "insert into path and import" using a decent shell (cygwin's bash on Windows, for example). The proposed:

PYTHONPATH=module.zip python -p module

doesn't appear to offer a major enhancement, just a very minor one, in my personal opinion.

One potential advantage of -p might be to let it be present together with one -c (even better might be to allow multiple -c, actually). If you want to run a "while foo.bep(): foo.zlup()" you can do it today only with a shell that allows easy input of one multiline argument. But again it seems a rather marginal issue to me, personally.

Alex

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