On Wed, Oct 3, 2018 at 2:13 AM Anthony Flury via Python-list <python-list@python.org> wrote: > I continued to read the documentation and came to this quote : > > /Functionality within this package requires that the > //|__main__|//module be importable by the children. This is covered > in //Programming guidelines > > <https://docs.python.org/3/library/multiprocessing.html?highlight=process#multiprocessing-programming>//however > it is worth pointing out here. This means that some examples, such > as the //|multiprocessing.pool.Pool| > > <https://docs.python.org/3/library/multiprocessing.html?highlight=process#multiprocessing.pool.Pool>//examples > will not work in the interactive interpreter./ > > The Documentation then gives a clear example very similar to mine : > > But when I run this exact example in the command line interpreter it > works fine : > > Is the documentation wrong ? is something weird going on ? >
You're running it on Linux, and it can fork to create child processes. If you were to run that on Windows, where forking isn't an option[1], the creation of child processes would involve spinning up a new Python process, importing main, and invoking the appropriate function from there. ChrisA [1] AIUI, forking technically is possible on Windows, but it's not the way things are done -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
