Question

So, I’m building a GUI in Python using Tkinter which will be used to, during runtime, load a textfile listing a number of python scripts. The scripts will then be executed and return a number indicating whether they were successful or not (returncode will not be returned with sys.exit, script files will have a function which will be called and return a 1 or a 0). During runtime I use exec to import the script files as modules and then call the function within the module with eval.

def runtest(test):
    exec 'import ' + test
    func=test+'.'+test+'()'
    return eval(func)

Problem is, the whole UI hangs during the evaluation, but I would rather have it running in the background. Would be much appreciated if anyone know of a way to make this happen.

Answer 1

There could be 2 ways.

1. Use Python multiprocessing library http://docs.python.org/library/multiprocessing.html

2. Python thread.

Option 1 is good compared to Option 2 due to Python’s GIL.

from multiprocessing import Process

def runtest(test):
   exec 'import ' + test
   func=test+'.'+test+'()'
   return eval(func)

if __name__ == '__main__':
p = Process(target=runtest, args=('mytest',))
p.start()
p.join()