Saturday 11:30 a.m.–noon
Type python, press enter. What happens?
Philip James, Asheesh Laroia
- Audience level:
- Intermediate
- Category:
- Systems Administration
Description
This talk discusses how the Python interpreter starts, from the perspective of the operating system (OS). Together, we will see the ins & outs of processes: fork(), exec(), stdin, and stdout.
It focuses on OS concepts and requires no background knowledge, using analogies to Python data structures. (The talk does not discuss Python’s own initialization, such as site.py or global variables.)
Abstract
This talk explains the basics of what happens when you start a Python interpreter from a command prompt. It covers the following topics:
- What a process ID is.
- What it means to forking a subprocess, and what environment variables are.
- How $PATH affects what your shell does.
- The underlying meaning of shell quoting.
- The difference between three ways to exit Python: exit(), ^C, and ^D.
