Run your (python) scripts Globally from anywhere, without the full path
While experimenting with python in my daily life i’ve found it to be a great tool for automating a lot of tedious tasks. Although i’m an IDE kind of guy i catch myself drifting more and more to the terminal for running my already finished scripts and tools. This is great because i don’t need to fire up the relatively slow-to-start pycharm editor evertytime i want to run a small task. The downside however is that i keep forgetting the full path to my scripts and to run it with the python prefix and the .py file extension. I want it to be simple.
So in this post i’d like to explain my solution to turn python scripts(or any script for that matter) into home-made globally accessible commands.
At first glance it doesn’t look that bad but when your script is in a path that’s twice as long and 3 months old you’ll find youself searching and typing way more than you ever should. We’re programmers after all, we make computers search for us. What we want to see is:
To make this work you’ll need to have python installed first, have a look here if you don’t already.
We’ll start with the test script we want to run, I modified my simple hello world script to print the first argument passed to the script 10 times. Take a look at the code:
There are two things we need to do to make it work:
1. Make a folder and add it to our PATH
2. Add a filetype association for .py
First we need to make a folter and drop our tool in there(and give it a more descriptive name than test.py). I made my tool folder right in C:// but you can put it anywhere you like, just remember the path for later.
Go to settings and follow the steps:
While your here, edit your PATHEXT as well, add ;.PY;.PYW to there if it’s not there already. The next steps should do that automatically but better safe than sorry as i tested this trick on another PC that didn’t do this automatically.
Alright, with the hardest part done we’re going to take care of the .py extension by making a filetype association.
Navigate to Default apps via system or the searchbar in the lower left corner and choose default apps by file type. It make take a while for the list to load but when it does scroll down to .py
If it doesn’t say python already just click it and select python from the list. If it does switch it to notepad and back to let windows take care of making the necessary associations.
Now restart your computer once or twice and we should be ready to go. Fire up your CMD and try it out yourself, just type the name of your tool and the parameters if it takes those.
