On Tue, Oct 19, 2010 at 12:35 PM, Steven D'Aprano <st...@remove-this-cybersource.com.au> wrote: > On Tue, 19 Oct 2010 06:25:30 -0700, swapnil wrote: >> This is useful for embedding applications where it might be desired that >> only user-defined paths are searched for modules. > > I doubt that very much. I expect that many things will break if Python > can't find (e.g.) the sys module. But you might be lucky.
sys is a bad example, because it is built-in and always available[1], even if the path is destroyed. I have personally done what OP is trying to do. It is not only possible (but interesting) to give Python access only to your own modules. It's similar to working in C without libc, and is just as feasible and doable. Running with -vv is very useful here, so you can see what Python does behind the scenes--the default site scripts actually import quite a bit before handing off to you, and even if path is wiped, those will continue to work (i.e., os; go interactive, import sys, sys.path = [], then try importing os and, say, cgi). Python doesn't expect to run this way so there's a few things you have to work around, but I expect there's more than a few apps that operate just like this. [1]: http://docs.python.org/library/sys.html -- Jed Smith j...@jedsmith.org -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
