Messed up with two python versions on linux

Question

As I understood, I have two versions of python 2.7 installed on my machine. One is located in /usr/bin and another one is in /usr/local/bin . When I type python in the shell, it calls one in /usr/local/bin , and it doesn't have access to all the packages installed using apt-get and pip. I have tried to set up an alias, but when I type sudo python it still calls one in /usr/local/bin . I want to always use one in /usr/bin , since I have all the packages there. How do I do that?

Answer 1

you can easily have two python version in your machine. But first I recommend to install the Anaconda package.

And then you can create an environment with python 3 version

conda create --name test_env python=3 numpy pandas

In order to activate it, you need to write in your terminal

source activate test_env

More info here: https://conda.io/docs/using/envs.html

Answer 2

From what I understood,

1. You have two version of python. One is in /usr/local/bin/python and another is in /usr/bin/python.
2. In your current configuration default python -> /usr/local/bin/python
3. You want to use the one that is in /usr/bin.

Update your ~/.bashrc and append this line at the end

alias python=/usr/bin/python

Then open a new terminal. Or do source ~/.bashrc in the current terminal

Run which python to see the location of the python executable. It will show you /usr/bin/python

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Also, if you want to get packages in your current python (ie /usr/local/bin/python) you can use pip with that particular python version.

1. Find pip location using which pip
2. Assuming pip location is /usr/local/bin/pip /usr/local/bin/python /usr/local/bin/pip install