I ran into this issue, and found references to it on StackOverflow [1] and GitHub [2] as well. I found that the problem applies to both the 'spawn' and 'forkserver' start methods on Linux.

I made an attempt to implement dancol's fix above. (1) and (3) are straightforward, but if there's an elegant way to do the "tickle" in (2) I wasn't able to figure it out?

My branch [3] has something that seems to work with the 'spawn' method and cx_Freeze. Perhaps someone could look at that and tell me if I'm on a reasonable track? If so, I can attempt to extend the method to cover 'forkserver' as well.

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/q/47325297/353839

[2] https://github.com/anthony-tuininga/cx_Freeze/issues/264

[3] bpo-32146-freeze_support">https://github.com/python/cpython/compare/master...bbayles:bpo-32146-freeze_support