# About .exe wrappers created by frontends when installing wheels on Windows?

**URL:** <https://discuss.python.org/t/about-exe-wrappers-created-by-frontends-when-installing-wheels-on-windows/75942>\
**Category:** Packaging\
**Tags:** Windows\
**Created:** [January 2, 2025, 2:17pm UTC](https://discuss.python.org/t/about-exe-wrappers-created-by-frontends-when-installing-wheels-on-windows/75942 "2025-01-02T14:17:15Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 7

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**Author:** ![paugier](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex002/user_avatar/discuss.python.org/paugier/32/2353_2.png) [@paugier](https://discuss.python.org/u/paugier)\
**Post date:** [January 3, 2025, 9:26am UTC](https://discuss.python.org/t/about-exe-wrappers-created-by-frontends-when-installing-wheels-on-windows/75942/7 "2025-01-03T09:26:05Z")

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Thanks a lot. All this is very interesting for me, who discover Windows and .exe wrappers.

To summarize the answers:

Having our own entry point is fine but it might not be necessary since

1. The effect of `PYTHONLEGACYWINDOWSSTDIO` can be obtained from Python

2. long paths should be activated when using console-script entry point since the general wrapper .exe created by distlib (so pip and pipx) launches python.exe in a subprocess, and python.exe has the correct manifest.

We will be able to try that for Mercurial.

## Side note

I still don’t understand how these .exe wrappers work on Windows and how they are used by Python. I see that they can be created without any compiler installed, which is counter intuitive for me. I don’t understand if they contain the absolute path towards the Python executable to be used. Can they just be copied in another location? Is the .exe wrapper created by pipx in `$HOME/.local/bin` just a copy of the .exe wrapper in the venv?

Can we somehow read the information in a .exe wrapper to know what is called (similar to `head $(which black)` on Unix)?

It seems to me that venv also uses a .exe wrapper for python.exe in a Python environment (the two files do not have the same size).

I’d like to understand these things in particular because of a performance issue I encounter on a Windows computer where I observe a delay of approximately 0.5 second before starting applications with .exe wrappers (see [Slow startup on Windows for virtual environments - #17 by paugier](https://discuss.python.org/t/slow-startup-on-windows-for-virtual-environments/75758/17)).

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