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About

The environment variable named PYTHONSTARTUP points the name of a file containing your start-up commands.

This file is only read in interactive sessions, not from a script.

If you want to read an additional start-up file from the current directory, you can program this in the global start-up file, e.g. “execfile('.pythonrc')”.

If you want to use the startup file in a script, you must do this explicitly in the script: 

import os
if os.path.isfile(os.environ['PYTHONSTARTUP']):
    # python 2
    execfile(os.environ['PYTHONSTARTUP'])
    # python 3
    exec(os.environ['PYTHONSTARTUP'])

Documentation / Reference

For more information about PYTHONSTARTUP variable, read the python man page: 

$ man python