Question

In *nix systems one can use which to find out the full path to a command. For example:

$ which python
/usr/bin/python

or whereis to show all possible locations for a given command

$ whereis python
python: /bin/python.exe /bin/python2.5-config /usr/bin/python.exe /usr/bin/python2.5-config /lib/python2.4 /lib/python2.5 /usr/lib/python2.4 /usr/lib/python2.5 /usr/include/python2.4 /usr/include/python2.5 /usr/share/man/man1/python.1

Is there an easy way to find out the location of a module in the PYTHONPATH. Something like:

>>> which (sys)
'c:\\Python25\Lib\site-packages'

Answer 1

If you do:

modulename.__file__

You will get a full path return of that exact module. For example, importing django:

>>>> import django
>>> django.__file__
'/home/bartek/.virtualenvs/safetyville/lib/python2.6/site-packages/django/__init__.pyc'

Edit: I recommend seeing the comments below for some good insight if you haven’t had a chance to.