ubuntu /usr/bin/env: python: No such file or directory

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

Having been momentarily stumped by this error myself, I thought I'd post how I fixed my problem.

My problem was an error:

: No such file or directory

Which made little sense to me. My problem is that my editor had silently converted the script from Unix LF to Windows CR/LF line-termination. A rather unfortunate upshot of this is that "#!/usr/bin/env python" actually became "#!/usr/bin/env python\015" where \015 is the invisible CR character... /usr/bin/env was, then, unable to find a command "python\015" - hence the file-not-found error.

Converting the script to Unix line-ending convention solved my problem... but only after a few minutes' head-scratching.

On Ubuntu 20.04 and newer, there is a package to fix this problem. Run the following commands:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install python-is-python3

Run apt-cache show python-is-python3 for more info.

@mchid's answer is the one you should go for it.

just FYI,

if you do this: $ python

it will say Command 'python' not found ...

But if you do this: $ python3, it should work.

So, just modify the shebang line

from !#/usr/bin/env python to !#/usr/bin/env python3, you're good to go.

(which is automatically done by doing sudo apt install python-is-python3)