Question

This code works in IDLE but not in the commandline. Why the difference?

poem = 'poem.txt'

f = file(poem)
while True:
    line = f.readline()
    if len(line) == 0:
        break
    print line,
f.close()

The poem.txt file exists (it is a string). The shell output is this:

"Programming is fun When the work is done if you wanna make your work also fun: use Python!"

The commandline output is this:

"No such file or directory: 'poem.txt'"

The poem.txt file is in the same folder as the .py file. What is going wrong here?

Answer 1

I believe you are not RUNNING the python script from the same directory as the poem.txt is in. Verify this by putting:

import os
print os.getcwd()

in your script.

Update

It seems like I was right. When you run: C:/Users/Python/filepractice.py the current working directory is the directory you are running it from, not the directory where filepractice.py is.

If you do this in cmd.exe

c:
cd \Users\Python
python filepractice.py

it would probably work.