PYTHONPATH missing from environment

Question

Please help me understand this. Here you can see that I have PYTHONPATH set (it's from my .bashrc )

jean@klippie:~$ echo $PYTHONPATH 
:/home/jean/local/lib/python2.6/site-packages

But if I try to launch something in my local site-packages it is ignored:

jean@klippie:~$ gtimelog
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/jean/bin/gtimelog", line 5, in <module>
    from pkg_resources import load_entry_point
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/pkg_resources.py", line 2671, in <module>
    working_set.require(__requires__)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/pkg_resources.py", line 654, in require
    needed = self.resolve(parse_requirements(requirements))
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/pkg_resources.py", line 552, in resolve
    raise DistributionNotFound(req)
pkg_resources.DistributionNotFound: gtimelog==0.5.0

Now if I manually export PYTHONPATH to exactly the value echo showed me above, it is NOT ignored:

jean@klippie:~$ export PYTHONPATH=:/home/jean/local/lib/python2.6/site-packages
jean@klippie:~$ gtimelog
# SUCCESS

Any clue what's going wrong?

Answer 1

Most probably, you only set the shell variable PYTHONPATH in your .bashrc , but you don't export this variable to the environment. Printing via echo only shows that the shell variable has the printed value. Try

env | grep PYTHONPATH

to query if PYTHONPATH is really in the environment and make sure you really export it in your .bashrc .