macos - How to find all python installations on mac os x and uninstall all but the native OS X installation

Question

I have installed a few versions on my MacBook for different projects and have only now realized what a mistake that was. I have used homebrew to install it, installed it via python's website (Python 2.7.8 Mac OS X 64-bit/32-bit x86-64/i386 Installer (for Mac OS X 10.6 and later [2])) and other ways I may not remember. I am running 10.9.4 OS X.

I am wondering how I can find the location of all python installations on my computer and delete everything and packages that depend on them except the native one. I'd like to essentially start from scratch without reinstalling my OS.

Also, I am wondering if I can apply the same method to find all pip related files.

Update:

which -a python gives me all the paths to each executable python. Is it normal to have multiple ones?

╭─ishaantaylor@Ishaans-MacBook-Pro.local ~
╰─?  which -a python
/usr/bin/python
/usr/bin/python
/usr/bin/python
/usr/bin/python
/usr/bin/python
/usr/bin//python
/usr/bin//python
/usr/bin/python

Answer 1

It's normal to have many python binaries. You can see which is which in /usr/bin with this command:

$ ls -l /usr/bin/python*

You will see several links to different places. The native python is that one, which is in the /System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/bin/. Note that for OSX 10.9 (and for everything at least until 10.13) this is the python2, not python3. So you can safely remove all the other versions.

What are the other versions which you may have?

• Something downloaded from the official site python.org. It is located in /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/. You can remove this.
• Anaconda distribution is by default located in /Users/your_user/anaconda3/, but of course you may put in the other place. But if it contains anaconda in the path – it's Anaconda distribution. You may remove this folder.
• Either homebrew or port versions are in /opt/local/bin/. See the link destination with $ ls -l /opt/local/bin/python*. The best way of removing this is to use built-in commands like uninstall.
• Some packages might be in ~/Library/Python/ - that's from pip. You may safely remove the entire content of this folder in order to have a "clean" python.
• Finally, after you removed all the other versions, do not forget to remove the broken links to binaries, if there are still any.

See also this answer.