I'm working with IPython and Spyder IDE on a Windows machine. When the IDE is starting, a set of py-files is loaded to define some functions that make my work a bit easier. Everything works as expected.
Now I would like to upgrade one of these function to use multiprocessing, but on Windows this requires the if __name__ == "__main__": statement. So it seems that I cannot call the function directly and pass the arguments from the IPython console.
For example one of the py-files (let's call it test.py) could look like the following code.
import multiprocessing as mp
import random
import string
# define a example function
def rand_string(length, output):
""" Generates a random string of numbers, lower- and uppercase chars. """
rand_str = ''.join(random.choice(
string.ascii_lowercase
+ string.ascii_uppercase
+ string.digits)
for i in range(length))
output.put(rand_str)
def myFunction():
# Define an output queue
output = mp.Queue()
# Setup a list of processes that we want to run
processes = [mp.Process(target=rand_string, args=(5, output)) for x in range(4)]
# Run processes
for p in processes:
p.start()
# Exit the completed processes
for p in processes:
p.join()
# Get process results from the output queue
results = [output.get() for p in processes]
print(results)
In my IPython console I would like to use the line
myFunction()
to trigger all the calculations. But on Windows a end up getting a BrokenPipe error.
When I put
if __name__ == "__main__":
myFunction()
at the end of the py-file and run the complete file by
runfile(test.py)
it works. Of course. But that makes it very hard to pass arguments to the function as I always have to edit the test.py-file itself.
