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I have installed cx_Freeze using the command python -m pip install cx_Freeze --upgrade.
After that I set the cmd directory to the folder that contains my .py file, and I typed python scratch.py build, but instead of compiling my code into an exe, it simply ran my code in the command line.
How would I go about fixing this?

That's not what the python command does.

Python is conceptually pretty simple to use. You've explored two ways to use it so far:

• 
  python -m pip ... runs the python module called pip, passing everything in the ... as arguments to that script.


• 
  python scratch.py ... runs the file scratch.py, passing everything in the ... as arguments to that script.

What you're doing here, then, is running the script scratch.py with the argument build - which probably doesn't mean anything to the program, so it just gets ignored. The script pip (which actually exists as its own executable already; you can do pip ... without the python -m) has special behaviors set up for when install is given as an argument to it, and so on.

If you want to build an .exe file out of your code, you'll have to look into tools that can do that for you, such as PyInstaller and py2exe. You may find This article helpful, as it elaborates more on these tools.