Add the following line to your new text file:
print "Hello World!"
Save the script as hello.py in your Desktop directory. The .py extension indicates that this file contains Python code.
Start a new command prompt. See the terminal navigation on Windows instructions for the steps to do this. Recall that a terminal prompt will look like C:and a Python prompt will look like >>>. Make sure you are at a terminal prompt and not a Python prompt; if you are at a Python prompt, you can type exit() on a line by itself and then hit enter to exit Python and return to a terminal prompt.
Navigate to your Desktop directory from a command prompt, using the dir and cd commands. See the terminal navigation on Windows instructions for a refresher on using these commands. Don’t hesitate to get help from a staff member on this step if you need it – it’s a new way of navigating your computer, so it may be unintuitive at first!
Once you are in your Desktop directory, you’ll see hello.py in the output of dir.
Type:
python hello.py
and hit enter. Doing this will cause Python to execute the contents of that script – it should print “Hello World!” to the screen. What you’ve done here is run the Python application with an argument – the name of a file, in this case “hello.py”. Python knows that when you give it a file name as an argument, it should execute the contents of the provided file. You get the same result as if you typed:
print "Hello World!"
at a Python prompt and hit enter.
You created and ran your first Python script!