It seems that IDLE changes its current working dir to location of the script that is executed, while when running the script using cmd doesn’t do that and it leaves CWD as it is.

To change current working dir to the one containing your script you can use:

import os
os.chdir(os.path.dirname(__file__))
print(os.getcwd())

The __file__ variable is available only if you execute script from file, and it contains path to the file. More on it here: Python __file__ attribute absolute or relative?