Sign Up to our social questions and Answers Engine to ask questions, answer people’s questions, and connect with other people.
Login to our social questions & Answers Engine to ask questions answer people’s questions & connect with other people.
Lost your password? Please enter your email address. You will receive a link and will create a new password via email.
Please briefly explain why you feel this question should be reported.
Please briefly explain why you feel this answer should be reported.
Please briefly explain why you feel this user should be reported.
Why is there so many Pythons installed in /usr/bin for my Snow Leopard? What decides which one is the System Python?
When I simply type “python” it is 2.6.1 ~ but this doesn’t seem to be the “System Python”, why not? How does one change system Python and what are the drawbacks?
My snow leopard only has python 2.5 and 2.6 installed, so it’s not that many. You may have additional pythons installed (i.e. python3.0), either system wide (in /usr/bin/) or through macports (/opt/local).
The default system python is defined through a setting,
will change the default to 2.5. You can also use an environment variable, i.e. for bash:
All of this is documented in the python manpage,
Overall, it’s better not to change the system default. It’s what OSX may depend on for certain scripts, and you never know if these scripts work as expected on different versions. Especially Python 3 is different, and may really break your whole system.
If you want a different python to be used for your own scripts, either