Windows is not passing command line arguments to Python programs executed from the shell

Question

I'm having trouble getting command line arguments passed to Python programs if I try to execute them directly as executable commands from a Windows command shell. For example, if I have this program (test.py):

import sys print "Args: %r" % sys.argv[1:] 

And execute:

>test foo Args: [] 

as compared to:

>python test.py foo Args: ['foo'] 

My configuration has:

PATH=...;C:\python25;... PATHEXT=...;.PY;....  >assoc .py .py=Python.File  >ftype | grep Python Python.CompiledFile="C:\Python25\python.exe" "%1" %* Python.File="C:\Python25\python.exe" "%1" %* Python.NoConFile="C:\Python25\pythonw.exe" "%1" %* 

Answer 1

I think I solved this. For some reason there is a SECOND place in the registry (besides that shown by the file associations stored in HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Python.File\shell\open\command):

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Applications\python.exe\shell\open\command] @="\"C:\\Python25\\python.exe\" \"%1\" %*" 

This seems to be the controlling setting on my system. The registry setting above adds the "%*" to pass all arguments to python.exe (it was missing in my registry for some reason).