Unable to open python on linux

Question

I know this may be the most silliest questions to be asked but i'm suddenly not able to open python from terminal. I have python 2.7 installed on ubuntu 14.04 box, but now when i fire python on my command line i get the error

aman@L-JZCHG32:~$ python

The program 'python' is currently not installed. You can install it by typing: sudo apt-get install python-minimal

I have tried reinstalling python

sudo dpkg -P python2.7
sudo apt-get install python2.7

but it still wont work. Can somebody suggest me what went wrong and how can i correct it. Thanks.

Answer 1

It seems you've probably corrupted your PATH variable. Try /usr/bin/python in the terminal. If that works, you'll need to fix your PATH variable.

A quick fix would be export PATH=/usr/bin:$PATH but there's probably something not quite right with the whole path variable at the moment, which would be worth further examining.