Question

I wrote a little Python script wrapcl.py script which wraps our compiler binary (cl.exe, the Microsoft Visual Studio C++ compiler). I then created a new batch file cl.bat which makes that Python script accessible so that I can run cl as before and it will silently call my wrapper script instead of the real program. For what it’s worth, here is my cl.bat batch file:

@python %~dp0\wrapcl.py %*

This works quite well – except in one case:

We have existing scripts which do something like

cl >NUL 2>&1 && GOTO CL

to determine whether the Microsoft Visual Studio C++ compiler is available. This breaks if cl actually calls my cl.bat batch file since the call to cl.bat never returns. We’d have to use call cl >NUL ... for that.

Is there any way I can make my wrapcl.py Python script look just like cl.exe for callers so that I can avoid touching our existing scripts which expect cl && foo to work?

Answer 1

One possibility is to compile your python code as an executable using py2exe. Here’s a link:
py2exe