Test if executable exists in Python?

Question

In Python, is there a portable and simple way to test if an executable program exists?

By simple I mean something like the which command which would be just perfect. I don't want to search PATH manually or something involving trying to execute it with Popen & al and see if it fails (that's what I'm doing now, but imagine it's launchmissiles)

Answer 1

The best example should be the python bulit-in module shutil.which() in Python 3. The link is https://hg.python.org/cpython/file/default/Lib/shutil.py

Answer 2

I know that I'm being a bit of a necromancer here, but I stumbled across this question and the accepted solution didn't work for me for all cases Thought it might be useful to submit anyway. In particular, the "executable" mode detection, and the requirement of supplying the file extension. Furthermore, both python3.3's shutil.which (uses PATHEXT) and python2.4+'s distutils.spawn.find_executable (just tries adding '.exe') only work in a subset of cases.

So I wrote a "super" version (based on the accepted answer, and the PATHEXT suggestion from Suraj). This version of which does the task a bit more thoroughly, and tries a series of "broadphase" breadth-first techniques first, and eventually tries more fine-grained searches over the PATH space:

import os
import sys
import stat
import tempfile


def is_case_sensitive_filesystem():
    tmphandle, tmppath = tempfile.mkstemp()
    is_insensitive = os.path.exists(tmppath.upper())
    os.close(tmphandle)
    os.remove(tmppath)
    return not is_insensitive

_IS_CASE_SENSITIVE_FILESYSTEM = is_case_sensitive_filesystem()


def which(program, case_sensitive=_IS_CASE_SENSITIVE_FILESYSTEM):
    """ Simulates unix `which` command. Returns absolute path if program found """
    def is_exe(fpath):
        """ Return true if fpath is a file we have access to that is executable """
        accessmode = os.F_OK | os.X_OK
        if os.path.exists(fpath) and os.access(fpath, accessmode) and not os.path.isdir(fpath):
            filemode = os.stat(fpath).st_mode
            ret = bool(filemode & stat.S_IXUSR or filemode & stat.S_IXGRP or filemode & stat.S_IXOTH)
            return ret

    def list_file_exts(directory, search_filename=None, ignore_case=True):
        """ Return list of (filename, extension) tuples which match the search_filename"""
        if ignore_case:
            search_filename = search_filename.lower()
        for root, dirs, files in os.walk(path):
            for f in files:
                filename, extension = os.path.splitext(f)
                if ignore_case:
                    filename = filename.lower()
                if not search_filename or filename == search_filename:
                    yield (filename, extension)
            break

    fpath, fname = os.path.split(program)

    # is a path: try direct program path
    if fpath:
        if is_exe(program):
            return program
    elif "win" in sys.platform:
        # isnt a path: try fname in current directory on windows
        if is_exe(fname):
            return program

    paths = [path.strip('"') for path in os.environ.get("PATH", "").split(os.pathsep)]
    exe_exts = [ext for ext in os.environ.get("PATHEXT", "").split(os.pathsep)]
    if not case_sensitive:
        exe_exts = map(str.lower, exe_exts)

    # try append program path per directory
    for path in paths:
        exe_file = os.path.join(path, program)
        if is_exe(exe_file):
            return exe_file

    # try with known executable extensions per program path per directory
    for path in paths:
        filepath = os.path.join(path, program)
        for extension in exe_exts:
            exe_file = filepath+extension
            if is_exe(exe_file):
                return exe_file

    # try search program name with "soft" extension search
    if len(os.path.splitext(fname)[1]) == 0:
        for path in paths:
            file_exts = list_file_exts(path, fname, not case_sensitive)
            for file_ext in file_exts:
                filename = "".join(file_ext)
                exe_file = os.path.join(path, filename)
                if is_exe(exe_file):
                    return exe_file

    return None

Usage looks like this:

>>> which.which("meld")
'C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Meld\\meld\\meld.exe'

The accepted solution did not work for me in this case, since there were files like meld.1, meld.ico, meld.doap, etc also in the directory, one of which were returned instead (presumably since lexicographically first) because the executable test in the accepted answer was incomplete and giving false positives.

Answer 3

There is a which.py script in a standard Python distribution (e.g. on Windows '\PythonXX\Tools\Scripts\which.py').

EDIT: which.py depends on ls therefore it is not cross-platform.

Answer 4

You can try the external lib called "sh" (http://amoffat.github.io/sh/).

import sh
print sh.which('ls')  # prints '/bin/ls' depending on your setup
print sh.which('xxx') # prints None

Answer 5

For python 3.2 and earlier:

my_command = 'ls'
any(os.access(os.path.join(path, my_command), os.X_OK) for path in os.environ["PATH"].split(os.pathsep))

This is a one-liner of Jay's Answer, Also here as a lambda func:

cmd_exists = lambda x: any(os.access(os.path.join(path, x), os.X_OK) for path in os.environ["PATH"].split(os.pathsep))
cmd_exists('ls')

Or lastly, indented as a function:

def cmd_exists(cmd):
    return any(
        os.access(os.path.join(path, cmd), os.X_OK) 
        for path in os.environ["PATH"].split(os.pathsep)
    )

For python 3.3 and later:

import shutil

command = 'ls'
shutil.which(command) is not None

As a one-liner of Jan-Philip Gehrcke Answer:

cmd_exists = lambda x: shutil.which(x) is not None

As a def:

def cmd_exists(cmd):
    return shutil.which(cmd) is not None

Answer 6

See os.path module for some useful functions on pathnames. To check if an existing file is executable, use os.access(path, mode), with the os.X_OK mode.

os.X_OK

Value to include in the mode parameter of access() to determine if path can be executed.

EDIT: The suggested which() implementations are missing one clue - using os.path.join() to build full file names.