Get the path of a particular module source using sys.path

For this method, we will be using the sys module. The sys.path variable of sys module contains all the directories which will be searched for modules at runtime. So by knowing these directories we can manually check where our particular module exists. To implement this we have to write the following in python shell:-

This will return the list of all directories which will be searched for the module at runtime.

Output:

[‘/home’, ‘/usr/lib/python2.7’, ‘/usr/lib/python2.7/plat-x86_64-linux-gnu’, ‘/usr/lib/python2.7/lib-tk’, 

‘/usr/lib/python2.7/lib-old’, ‘/usr/lib/python2.7/lib-dynload’, ‘/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages’, 

‘/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages’]

In this article, we will see how to locate a particular module in Python. Locating a module means finding the directory from which the module is imported. When we import a module the Python interpreter searches for the module in the following manner:

• First, it searches for the module in the current directory.
• If the module isn’t found in the current directory, Python then searches each directory in the shell variable PYTHONPATH. The PYTHONPATH is an environment variable, consisting of a list of directories.
• If that also fails python checks the installation-dependent list of directories configured at the time Python is installed.

The sys.path contains the list of the current directory, PYTHONPATH, and the installation-dependent default. We will discuss how to use this and other methods to locate the module in this article.