[Tutor] Adding a search path PERMANENTLY? (original) (raw)

orbitz orbitz at ezabel.com
Sat Jul 10 22:04:21 CEST 2004

It is meaningful in that if you have a module named..say..urllib in your PYTHONPATH, and you do import urllib in a program you will get the one in yoru PYTHONPATH not the standard one.

Hee-Seng Kye wrote:

Hi, Brian. Thanks for your response. Yes, I'm on Mac, but I mainly work on UNIX shell (tcsh). Someone else (a.k.a orbitz) replied and directed me to the source, so the problem is solved.

I do have a question for you though. You specifically mention that 'setting the PYTHONPATH will put the specified dirs ahead of the standard lib dirs in sys.path,' and that's exactly what I experienced. Is new path supposed be placed where it is placed? Does it have any meaning other than the fact that it will be searched before the standard lib paths? You seem to be very specific about it, so I'm just wondering. Thanks a lot for your response. Best, Kye p.s. For those who might be asking the same question in the future, this is how it's done on tcsh. Put the following line in .tcshrc (or .cshrc if you are on csh, I think...): setenv PYTHONPATH "your desired path here" It was confusing to me at first due to the absence of the '=' sign. The above syntax should work.

On Jul 10, 2004, at 2:36 PM, Brian van den Broek wrote: Hee-Seng Kye said unto the world upon 10/07/2004 12:37:

Could anyone tell me how to set a Python search path PERMANENTLY? If I do: >>> import sys >>> sys.path.append('/users/kyeser/python/module') It's only valid while the interpreter is active and goes away when I restart the interpreter. Every manual I've read said something about setting PYTHONPATH, but I'm not sure how. I'm also curious how to set PYTHONSTARTUP. I've tried creating '.pythonrc.py' at my home directory, but it didn't do anything. If I wanted to do something like: >>> import sys >>> sys.ps1 = '--> ' How would I make this permanent? Many thanks, Kye

Hi Kye, I've just been posting about this the last few days. Here's what I (think I) know: 1) Setting the PYTHONPATH environment variable will put the specified dirs ahead of the standard lib dirs in sys.path. On Windows, you can set this with autoexec.bat or, with more recent version, through the Control Panel->System->Environment Variables. Your msg headers say your a Mac person; I've no idea for Macs. You might try <http://docs.python.org/mac/node7.html>, though. 2) Using .pth files will put your new dirs towards the end of sys.path. .pth files are plain text files, one dir per line. Put them somewhere in the unmodified sys.path. (The docs imply anywhere is sys.path, but I had no luck with placing them in dirs added to sys.path via PYTHONPATH.) 3) PYTHONSTARTUP has effect only for interactive prompt sessions. For more, see <http://docs.python.org/inst/search-path.html>. I may also have had some details in my recent (last 2-3 days) Tutor posts that I've here omitted. HTH, Brian vdB

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