At our site we run IRIX, UNICOS, Solaris, Tru64, Linux, cygwin and other unixy OSes.
We have python installed in a number of different places: /bin/python /usr/local/bin/python /usr/bin/python /opt/freeware/Python/Python-2.5.1/bin/python ~mataap/platform/python/python-2.5.1 So I cannot assume a single location for python. Nor for any other tool, really. Bash for example. It may indeed be in /usr/bin on many systems, on many others it is not. Note the version specific install points. This allows us to switch over easily to different versions, and keep older versions in case they are needed. We can test new versions before cutting over to them operationally. (This matters for tools that are still changing, like python or bash.) We use the very handy 'modules' package (not python modules, not fortran modules) to adjust our paths and environment variables as needed. Some of the install points are determined by policy, or historical constraints, or hardware limits, or file system layout. Now it is true that it is easy to edit a single script to change the hashbang line. It is not easy to change several hundred scripts, on different machines. It is easy to adjust the environment to point to the right python path, and have all your scripts pick it up automatically. Use /usr/bin/env. If env is not in /usr/bin, put a link to it there. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
