PYTHONPATH

[Brian van den Broek]

Edward Elliott said unto the world upon 23/04/06 04:28 PM:
> Brian van den Broek wrote:
> 
>>The suggestions above appear not to work for me:
>>
>>brian at Cedric:~$ cat /etc/profile | grep 'export PYTHONPATH'
>>export PYTHONPATH="~/PythonFiles"
>>brian at Cedric:~$ cat .bash_profile | grep 'export PYTHONPATH'
>>export PYTHONPATH="~/PythonFiles"
> 
> 
> Those files are only read when you start the shell.  I'm guessing you made 
> those changes from the currently running shell.  To fix it you have 3 choices:
> 1. Close the shell and start a new one
> 2. Type 'bash -l' at the prompt to invoke a new login shell
> 3. Type '. .bash_profile' to read the changes into your current shell

Edward,

thanks for the reply. I'm going to not worry about exposing my
ignorance in what follows :-)

I ought to have specified that I did indeed think to invoke a new
shell after I made the changes. However, trying (2) and (3) as you
specified shed some light.

Early on, (probably miss-)following something I read on the net, I'd put
a block into my .bash_profile that read:

if 1; then
     somestuff

Trying (3) gave
brian at Cedric:~$ . .bash_profile
bash: 1: command not found

Commenting out the bad block in .bash_profile, if I open a shell and 
things are somewhat better.

Only somewhat, as if I open a brand new shell:

brian at Cedric:~$ python
Python 2.4.2 (#2, Sep 30 2005, 21:19:01)
[GCC 4.0.2 20050808 (prerelease) (Ubuntu 4.0.1-4ubuntu8)] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
 >>> from sys import path
 >>> path[0:3]
['', '/usr/lib/python24.zip', '/usr/lib/python2.4']
 >>>
brian at Cedric:~$ . .bash_profile
brian at Cedric:~$ python
Python 2.4.2 (#2, Sep 30 2005, 21:19:01)
[GCC 4.0.2 20050808 (prerelease) (Ubuntu 4.0.1-4ubuntu8)] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
 >>> from sys import path
 >>> path[0:3]
['', '/home/brian/PythonFiles', '/usr/lib/python24.zip']
 >>>


So, it seems that I currently have to invoke '. .bash_profile'
manually with each new shell opened for this to have effect. (Trained 
by Bill, I even rebooted to be sure that the invocation of
'. .bash_profile' is needed.)
But, still it is closer :-)

I still haven't managed to coerce lines in /etc/profile exporting 
PYTHONPATH to have an effect.



<snip>

>>I don't know where to look for more information; I'm assuming that 
>>ubuntu isn't doing it the standard way bruno referred to above. Could 
>>some ubuntu user cast light, please?
> 
> 
> This information bruno gave is correct.  

I didn't mean to suggest bruno was wrong, but instead that perhaps
ubuntu was a distro falling under his phrase:

> but this may vary according to your distro and your shell

such that the instructions he gave would not work without
modification. Apologies if I gave a different impression.

<snip>


> You might want to google for "bash shell tutorial" and familiarize yourself 
> with how bash shells work.  It can be somewhat confusing at first, but it's 
> a very powerful way to interact with your system.

Thanks for the suggestions. With luck, I'll get the remaining issue
sorted. Thanks for the help,

Brian vdB