Ghost variable "idle" in terminal/cygwin?

Question

I cannot figure out where, how, or why the variable "idle" has been set.

• It is not in an alias
• It isn't in my .bashrc file
• It isn't in my PATH
• It isn't a user-entered variable, because it doesn't show up when I execute this: ( set -o posix ; set ) | less

but, when I type cygstart idle somehow the program still starts. Why is this?

something that is also curious is that when I execute just idle, i.e. without the cygstart command, it attempts to execute a python file. Any ideas what might be going on?

Perhaps I am looking for suggestions about how to investigate, since I realize that there might be other problems specific to my machine. Thanks.

Answer 1

Since 3.4, PSF CPython Windows installers put /Scripts in the pythonxy directory. Pip and easy-install are pre-installed in Scripts. When pip is used to install packages, associated executables are put in the corresponding /Scripts. If pythonxy is the default python installation, pythonxy/Scripts is added to the system PATH and idle.bat is added. (At least, this is what happened on my machine.) So yes, command prompt> idle should work as you describe, at least for 3.4.

Answer 2

It's not a variable. IDLE is the name of a Python IDE.

You can launch it either directly or through Cygwin.

cygstart can be given the name of a file or program. If you give it the name of a program, it will run it.