在 PyCharm 中打开 a.py 文件是否有害/恶意？

Question

I've just started learning Python and have downloaded PyCharm and understand this is likely to be a very basic question but wanted to ask before I set off with a false sense of security.

I'm interested to know whether:

a) Simply opening but not running a .py file as a project in PyCharm IDE could be malicious.

b) Opening and running a .py file in the PyCharm IDE can be malicious

If not either, why not? Would the file need to be a.exe to do anything without PyCharm being involved?

Again, appreciate any help/insight you can provide.

Answer 1

So just opening a file in PyCharm will not harm any computer in any way.
But running code can do that, so I would be careful were you get the code which you want to execute. And it would be best if you understood the basic of the code you are running. Therefore you would be able to spot strange lines in your code.

Answer 2

A Python source file (like any other programming language) is just a plain text file, so until the instructions that are written in the file are evaluated (by the python interpreter in this case) the file itself cannot be in any way harmful. Only once you run python myfile.py in a shell or by using an IDE like PyCharm the code is actually executed... at that point what happens depends on what is written in the file (which you can check before executing it).