Cannot get python on mac osx to reference my scripts folder

Question

Am pretty new to python although have programmed a lot before. I'm using mac osx snow leopard and python 2.6.1.

I've followed this post about setting your PYTHONPATH to a custom scripts directory but can't get python to recognise it. How can I run my python script from the terminal in Mac OS X without having to type the full path?

So i've got a simple helloworld script in /Users/richn/Documents/scripts/ called hello.py

Inside is this

#!/usr/bin/env python

print "Hello World!"

I've created a .profile file in my home directory with this in it

export PYTHONPATH=/Users/richn/Documents/scripts

I've also changed permissions of the file to make it executable with chmod a+x hello.py

Running ./hello.py in the terminal from that scripts folder works fine however whenever i run it outside of that folder i get this error

-bash: ./hello.py: No such file or directory

How can i get my scripts to run outside of that folder? Anyone got any ideas?

Thanks very much

• Thomas Orozco: You want your terminal to pick up the file, not your Python interpreter, so you should be updating PATH not PYTHONPATH.

Answer 1

What you'll want to do is to edit your PATH variable which is a list of directories your command shell checks when you run a command that does not begin with / or ./ rather than PYTHONPATH:

export PATH="$PATH:/Users/richn/Documents/scripts"

After you have exported your PATH variable you should be able to confirm that it has exported correctly:

echo $PATH

and afterwards you should be able to run "hello.py" successfully.