On Mon, Sep 23, 2019 at 06:56:47PM +0200, Thomas Schmitt wrote: > Greg Wooledge wrote: > > I'd be rather surprised if there's *no* function in Python that uses > > the PATH variable. > > Problem is that Richard Owlett expected it to work in the starter program > of the interpreter (here: /usr/bin/python) when it opens the script file > for reading. I assume Python developers consider this too much of Silly Walks.
If it's about shebangs, the most widely respect authority is Sven Mascheck's page <http://www.in-ulm.de/~mascheck/various/shebang/>. In a nutshell, the shebang should be a full path to a program. If one doesn't wish to hard-code the path to python, this is an acceptable hack: #!/usr/bin/env python This relies on the real-world knowledge that env(1) is virtually always in /usr/bin, on every unix-based system. env(1) will search PATH to find a program named "python" and exec (chain-load) it. If a script is only intended to run on Debian, or more specifically, if it's only intended to run on *one* particular Debian system (his), hard-coding the path to python would be preferred. There's no reason to introduce the /usr/bin/env hack in that case. For any questions about writing Python scripts, portability of Python script shebangs, etc., he should ask a Python mailing list.
