/usr/bin/env: ‘python’: No such file or directory

I am trying to install Gitlab Development Kit on Windows Ubuntu Bash.

$python3 output

Python 3.5.2 (default, Nov 17 2016, 17:05:23)
[GCC 5.4.0 20160609] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>>

$python output

The program 'python' can be found in the following packages: * python-minimal * python3
Try: sudo apt install <selected package>

When I try to do this:

sudo apt-get install build-essential
./configure
make -j4 # adjust according to your available CPU capacity
sudo make install

This is the output after ./configure

$ ./configure
/usr/bin/env: ‘python’: No such file or directory

$ python --version
The program 'python' can be found in the following packages: * python-minimal * python3
Try: sudo apt install <selected package>
$which -a python

no output

How can I solve this? I am new to Ubuntu.

9 Answers

For ubuntu 20.04 you can use following package to python command. And it is python 3.

sudo apt-get install python-is-python3

Problem scenario:

/usr/bin/env: ‘python’: No such file or directory

Possible Solution #1

If Python 3 is not installed, install it: apt-get install python3

Possible Solution #2

If Python 3 has been installed, run these commands: whereis python3

Then we create a symlink to it: sudo ln -s /usr/bin/python3 /usr/bin/python

I had the same problem after installing Ubuntu 18.04 and trying to run some python scripts.

I tried:

sudo apt-get install python2.7-minimal

but I still got the same error. I solved it by:

sudo apt install python-minimal

You do seem to have python3 installed, but it isn't called python and anyway the script you want to run (configure) requires python 2. So:

Install python2
```
sudo apt-get install python2.7-minimal
```
Run it again
```
./configure
```

If that fails again, call it with python2 explicitly:

/usr/bin/python2.7 configure

Yet Another Solution:

$ sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/python python /usr/bin/python3 10
update-alternatives: using /usr/bin/python3 to provide /usr/bin/python (python) in auto mode

Tested & verified on my 20.04LTS system. See man update-alternatives for details. And, "No - it's not necessary to have Python2 installed for this to work."

I had the same problem, It got solved by linking python to python2.7 with the following commands

cd /usr/bin
sudo mv python python.bak
sudo ln -s /usr/bin/python2.7 /usr/bin/python

If you don't want to mess up with your system configuration, you can just replace the first line of your configure file

Open it with your favorite text editor
Replace #!/usr/bin/env python with #!/usr/bin/env python3
Save and keep playing!

Just for reference... I had a similar issue - running a python script from the docker container failed with "No such file or directory", my solution was to force Unix style line endings on the checkout of the code and in the IDE (as it was bind-mounted from the Windows host to the container).

Check the spelling in the first line. Trailing spaces have been known to prevent the shell from locating the shell...

"#!/usr/bin/env tclsh "

The training space confused bash.