I accidentally deleted /usr/bin/python. How do I restore it?

Trying to set the default Python version to 2.7, I ran this command:

sudo rm /usr/bin/python*

Now when I type python or python2.7, I see these error messages:

bash: /usr/bin/python: No such file or directory
bash: /usr/bin/python2.7: No such file or directory

What happened? Should I have run the rm command? How can I undo it?

Solution 1:

Well, isn't normal that if you remove an executable, the system can't find it anymore?

/usr/bin/python is a symlink provided by the python-minimal package. You can restore it reinstalling the package:

sudo apt-get install --reinstall python-minimal

Solution 2:

If you have python2.7-minimal (or any of the other variants) installed, you should have the file /usr/bin/python2.7 present. Normally, /usr/bin/python will be symlinked to this file, so that a simple call of python actually ends up running /usr/bin/python2.7.

me@banshee:~$ ls -l /usr/bin/python*
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root       9 Apr 17  2012 /usr/bin/python -> python2.7
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root       9 Apr 17  2012 /usr/bin/python2 -> python2.7
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 2989480 Aug  1 01:40 /usr/bin/python2.7

If you do have /usr/bin/python2.7 but you're missing /usr/bin/python, you can simply recreate it from the command line:

you@yourbox:~$ sudo ln -s /usr/bin/python2.7 /usr/bin/python

If you're missing /usr/bin/python2.7, you'll need to reinstall it (again) as proposed by the other answers. Please post back here if that's the case.

Solution 3:

From a terminal, type sudo apt-get install --reinstall python2.7