Develop Reference

What is it called when a program takes control over a console, and how can one do that in python?

I am planning to make a python program which displays some sequential info in the console without adding newlines, i.e. similarly to what man does - the console is taken over by the program and all the input goes to the program, and the program is able to update text in place rather than having to print on a newline every time. I don't know what is the proper term for this, which makes for a "problem of unknown terminology" (which I'm sure has a proper name as well, but ironically I do not know it either), and thus makes it near impossible for me to search for the answer myself.

Python module to keep a file location variable updated?

I have a variable in my python script that holds the path to a file as a string. Is there a way, through a python module, etc, to keep the file path updated if the file were to be moved to another destination?

Short answer: no, not with a string.
Long answer: If you want to use only a string to record the location of this file, you're probably out of luck unless you use other tools to find the location of the file, or record whenever it moves - I don't know what those tools are.
You don't give a lot of info in your question about what you want this variable for; as #DeepSpace says in his comment, if you're trying to make this String follow the file between different runs of this program, then you'd be better off making an argument for the script. If, however, you expect the file to move sometime during the execution of your program, you might be able to use a file object to keep track of it. Or, rather - instead of keeping the filepath in memory, keep a file descriptor in memory instead (the kind you would generate by using the open() function, and just never close that file until the program terminates. You can use seek to return to the start of the file if you needed to read it multiple times. Problems with this include that it's not memory-safe, and it's absolutely not a best practice.

TL;DR
Your best bet is probably to go with a solution like #DeepSpace mentioned where you could go and call your script with a parameter in command-line which will then force the user to input a valid path.
This is actually a really good question, but unfortunately purely Pythonly speaking, this is impossible.
No python module will be able to dynamically linked a variable to a path on the file-system. You will need an external script or routine which will update any kind of data structure that will hold the path value.
Even then, the name of the file could change, but not it's location. here is what I mean by that.
Let's say you were to wrapped that file in a folder only containing that specific file. Since you now know that it's location is fixed (theoretically speaking), you can have another python script/routine that will read the filename and store it in a textfile. Your other script could go and get that file name (considering your routine would sync that file on a regular basis). But, as soon as the location of the file changes, how can you possibly know where it is now. It has to be manually hard coded somewhere to have something close to the behavior your expecting.
Note that my example is not in any way a solution to go-to for your problem. I'm actually trying to underline the shortcomings of such a feature.

Keeping the user's input intact when outputing to terminal at the same time

To simplify, let's say I'm trying to write a command line two-way chat in Python. I would like the user to input his message with input() at the command prompt, but a listening thread could print a message at any moment. By default, this would "break" the user's input. Visually something like this:
userB>Stop interuserA wrote:Hey check this out!
rupting me!
The closest I was able to find was this answer here which is almost, but not exactly, what I'm looking for, but it did point me towards the blessings package which seems to be what I need (although I'm happy with an answer for any package, or even pure ANSII).
What I'm trying to achieve is to print incoming output from a Thread above the user's input, so that his text doesn't break. Let's say the user is typing:
userB>Stop inter
Suddenly a message comes in from the thread, but our user's input doesn't brake:
userA says: Ok I won't interrupt you
userB>Stop inter
What should my threads theoretical print_incoming_message() method look like to achieve this?
NB: I'm using Linux and am not interested in cross-platform compatibility.

There are two ways of doing this.
One is to use ncurses. There are python bindings for this. With ncurses, the terminal screen is under your complete control, and you can print characters at any point.
Without ncurses, you can't write above the current line. What you can do, however, is print a \r character and go back to the beginning of the line.
If you save the user's input (say he wrote foo), and you want to print the line bar above that, you can output:
\rbar\nfoo
This will overwrite the current line, and introduce a newline, moving the user's input down. The effect is similar, but it won't be as tamper-proof as ncurses.

Is it possible to restrict access to globals for a block of code in python?

I would like users of my program to be able to define custom scripts in python without breaking the program. I am looking at something like this:
def call(script):
code = "access modification code" + script
exec(code)
Where "access modification code" defines a scope such that script can only access variables it instantiates itself. Is it possible to do this or something with similar functionality, such as creating a new python environment with its own scope and then receiving output from it?
Thank you for your time :)
Clarification Edit
"I want to prevent both active attacks and accidental interaction with the program variables outside the users script (hence hiding all globals). The user scripts are intended to be small and inputted as text. The return of the user script needs to be immediate, as though it were native to the program."

There's two separate problems you want to prevent in this scenario:
Prevent an outside attacker from running arbitrary code in the context of the OS user executing your program. This means preventing arbitrary code execution and privilege escalation.
Preventing a legitimate user of your program from changing the program behavior in unintended ways.
For the first problem, you need to make sure that the source of the python code you execute is the user. You shouldn't accept input from a socket, or from a file that other users can write to. You need to make sure, somehow, that it was the user who is running the program that provided the input.
Actual solutions will depend on your OS, but you may want to consider setting up restrictive file permissions, if you're storing the code in a file.
Don't ignore or downplay this problem, or your users will fall victim to virus/malware/hackers thanks to your program.
The way you solve the second problem depends on what exactly constitutes intended behaviour in your program. If you're happy with outputting simple data structures, you can run your user-inputted code in a separate process, and pass the result over a pipe in a serialization format such as JSON or YAML.
Here's a very simple example:
#remember to set restrictive file permissions on this file. This is OS-dependent
USER_CODE_FILE="/home/user/user_code_file.py"
#absolute path to python binary (executable)
PYTHON_PATH="/usr/bin/python"
import subprocess
import json
user_code= '''
import json
my_data= {"a":[1,2,3]}
print json.dumps(my_data)
'''
with open(USER_CODE_FILE,"wb") as f:
f.write(user_code)
user_result_str= subprocess.check_output([PYTHON_PATH, USER_CODE_FILE])
user_result= json.loads( user_result_str )
print user_result
This is a fairly simple solution, and it has significant overhead. Don't use this if you need to run the user code many times in a short period of time.
Ultimately, this solution is only effective against unsophisticated attackers (users). Generally speaking, there's no way to protect any user process from the user itself - nor would it make much sense.
If you really want more assurance, and want to mitigate the first problem too, you should run the process as a separate ("guest") user. This, again, is OS-dependent.
Finally a warning: avoid exec and eval to the best of your abilities. They don't protect either your program or the user against the inputted code. There's a lot of information about this on the web, just search for "python secure eval"

Back end process in windows

I need to run the python program in the backend. To the script I have given one input file and the code is processing that file and creating new output file. Now if I change the input file content I don't want to run the code again. It should run in the back end continously and generate the output file. Please if someone knows the answer for this let me know.
thank you

Basically, you have to set up a so-called FileWatcher, i.e. some mechanism which looks out for changes in a file.
There are several techniques for watching file/directory changes in python. Have a look at this question: Monitoring contents of files/directories?. Another link is here, this is about directory changes but file changes are handled in a similar way. You could also google for "watch file changes python" in order to get a lot of answers :)
Note: If you're programming in windows, you should probably implement your program as windows service, look here for how to do that.