Commit 061cb3b0 authored by R David Murray's avatar R David Murray

#15104: improve the discussion of __main__.

Patch by Sam Lucidi.
parent 1343b25f
......@@ -5,13 +5,19 @@
.. module:: __main__
:synopsis: The environment where the top-level script is run.
'__main__' is the name of the scope in which top-level code executes.
A module's __name__ is set equal to '__main__' when read from
standard input, a script, or from an interactive prompt.
This module represents the (otherwise anonymous) scope in which the
interpreter's main program executes --- commands read either from standard
input, from a script file, or from an interactive prompt. It is this
environment in which the idiomatic "conditional script" stanza causes a script
to run::
A module can discover whether or not it is running in the main scope by
checking its own __name__, which allows a common idiom for conditionally
executing code in a module when it is run as a script or with `python
-m` but not when it is imported:
if __name__ == "__main__":
# execute only if run as a script
main()
For a package, the same effect can be achieved by including a
__main__.py module, the contents of which will be executed when the
module is run with -m.
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