[Sussex] Python console scripts

[Geoffrey J Teale]

On Mon, 2005-10-17 at 17:25 +0100, Diego Moore wrote:
> This is so bizarre!

It certainly is...

> Been having all sort of issues with the delivery of an upgrade of an
> bespoke application. A section of this were a couple of Python scripts
> which run through endless loops and logs some useful details to the
> console as well as the log file.
> 
> It turns out that the script pauses when the Windows [1] command
> prompt is double clicked or a section of the screen is selected, the
> script just pauses!!

*Euuuuw*  Poor old python got bit by the windows bug.. 

> So guess how long it took us to figure that one out?! We could not
> figure out why the App will stop responding...
> 
> Does anyone know if this is common? or maybe just a bug, flippin'
> annoying though.

You see the obvious bug, your running windows... :-)

It's quite common for terminals to hold on to the current output (i.e.
not scroll) when you click on them.  Perhaps in order to emulate this
functionality those charming techno-innocents at Microsoft decided to
send the process the equivalent of a Ctrl-Z.  I've never seen this, but
then I do all my python programming on Linux.

I don't really recall how Windows interacts with processes (I should
remember, I've done a _lot_ of Windows programming - but I seem gc'd the
memory), anyhow it must have some way of signalling to a process that it
should pause, and I'd imagine that there must be some way of ignoring
that signal.

> Its running on Python 2.4.1 on Windows Server 2003. I have also
> managed to replicate it on 2.4.2 + XP

Figures.  

> 
> Diego Moore
> 
> [1] I know this is OT, but I remember seeing some Python guys here!

:-)  Yup, plenty of python programmers around here.. but Windows is just
a bitter memory for me.


-- 
Geoffrey J Teale <tealeg at member.fsf.org>
Free Software Foundation