How to get the PYTHONPATH in shell?

Question

debian@debian:~$ echo $PYTHONPATH  
/home/qiime/lib/:  
debian@debian:~$ python  
Python 2.7.3 (default, Jan  2 2013, 16:53:07)   
[GCC 4.7.2] on linux2  
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.  
>>> import sys  
>>> sys.path  
['', '/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/feedparser-5.1.3-py2.7.egg',   
'/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/stripogram-1.5-py2.7.egg', '/home/qiime/lib', 
'/home/debian', '/usr/lib/python2.7', '/usr/lib/python2.7/plat-linux2',   
'/usr/lib/python2.7/lib-tk', '/usr/lib/python2.7/lib-old', '/usr/lib/python2.7/lib-
dynload',   '/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages', '/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages', 
'/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/PIL', '/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/gst-0.10',  
'/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/gtk-2.0', '/usr/lib/pymodules/python2.7']    

How can I get all of PYTHONPATH output in bash?
Why echo $PYTHONPATH can not get all of them?

Answer 1

The environment variable PYTHONPATH is actually only added to the list of locations Python searches for modules. You can print out the full list in the terminal like this:

python -c "import sys; print(sys.path)"

Or if want the output in the UNIX directory list style (separated by :) you can do this:

python -c "import sys; print(':'.join(x for x in sys.path if x))"

Which will output something like this:

/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/feedparser-5.1.3-py2.7.egg:/usr/local/lib/
python2.7/dist-packages/stripogram-1.5-py2.7.egg:/home/qiime/lib:/home/debian:/us
r/lib/python2.7:/usr/lib/python2.7/plat-linux2:/usr/lib/python2.7/lib-tk:/usr/lib
/python2.7/lib-old:/usr/lib/python2.7/lib- dynload:/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-
packages:/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages:/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/PIL:/u
sr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/gst-0.10:/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/gtk-2.0:
/usr/lib/pymodules/python2.7