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I am having trouble with my current python, so I wanted to uninstall my python and install the latest version. I installed with homebrew, so I uninstalled it with homebrew and reinstalled python 3.8.1 with the installer from the official site. Python3.8 was installed, but my python3 was not upgraded.

 ~ which python3 /usr/bin/python3 ~ python3 --version Python 3.7.3

I know I'm not supposed to(and I can't) manually delete things inside /usr/bin. What am I supposed to do?

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  • What does your PATH look like? echo $PATH. Likely /usr/local/bin simply isn't in it and/or /usr/bin has higher priority. Commented Jan 15, 2020 at 9:17
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    ~ echo $PATH /usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/Applications/VMware Fusion.app/Contents/Public:/Applications/Visual Studio Code.app/Contents/Resources/app/bin:/usr/local/opt/fzf/bin:/Applications/Visual Studio Code.app/Contents/Resources/app/bin Sry I don’t understand. Can you explain it again? Commented Jan 15, 2020 at 9:21
  • That looks okay… what does which -a python3 give you? Does it find /usr/local/bin/python3? Commented Jan 15, 2020 at 9:23
  • it gives me /usr/bin/python3 Commented Jan 15, 2020 at 9:25
  • Does /usr/local/bin/python3 actually exist? Can you execute /usr/local/bin/python3 -V? Commented Jan 15, 2020 at 9:25

2 Answers 2

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When you installed Python with homebrew it told you this:

Unversioned symlinks python, python-config, pip etc. pointing to python3, python3-config, pip3 etc., respectively, have been installed into /usr/local/opt/python/libexec/bin

If you need a reminder, post install, you will get the same message if you run:

brew info python

It says "unversioned links are in /usr/local/opt/python/libexec/bin". That means, if you want to run Python without specifying the version, i.e. if you want to type this:

python

and this:

pip

to start Python 3 and its corresponding pip, you need to make sure your PATH has /usr/local/opt/python/libexec/bin at the start, i.e.

export PATH=/usr/local/opt/python/libexec/bin:$PATH
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Any reasons behind it? Why can /usr/local/bin has all the unversioned links? Potentially, conflicts with other system components?
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I could not uninstall the python3 in /usr/bin but found a workaround to give the python3 in /usr/loca/bin precedence by setting the PATH env variable as PATH=/usr/local/bin:$PATH. This gives binaries in /usr/local/bin precedence. Not a full fledged solution, but got me moving.

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