user

Hook to allow user-specified customization code to run.

As a policy, Python doesn’t run user-specified code on startup of Python programs (interactive sessions execute the script specified in the PYTHONSTARTUP environment variable if it exists).

However, some programs or sites may find it convenient to allow users to have a standard customization file, which gets run when a program requests it. This module implements such a mechanism. A program that wishes to use the mechanism must execute the statement

import user

The user module looks for a file .pythonrc.py in the user’s home directory and if it can be opened, execfile()s it in its own global namespace. Errors during this phase are not caught; that’s up to the program that imports the user module, if it wishes.

The user’s .pythonrc.py could conceivably test for sys.version if it wishes to do different things depending on the Python version.