Seeing the package search path

The Python search path can be seen by importing the sys package to see sys.path:

>>> import sys
>>> sys.path
['', '/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.3/lib/python3.3/site-packages/setuptools-2.0.2-py3.3.egg',
…, etc.
'/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.3/lib/python33.zip',
'/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.3/lib/python3.3',
'/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.3/lib/python3.3/plat-darwin',
'/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.3/lib/python3.3/lib-dynload',
'/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.3/lib/python3.3/site-packages']

We've elided a number of lines from this output to show the essentials of how the standard library fits into the way we develop Python code. This list of places to search for modules is built by the sites package when Python starts running.

The zero-length directory...