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)
On the basis that it is easier to ask forgiveness than permission (and, importantly, that the command is safe to run) I would just try to use it and catch the error (OSError in this case - I checked for file does not exist and file is not executable and they both give OSError).
It helps if the executable has something like a --version or --help flag that is a quick no-op.
import subprocess
myexec = "python2.8"
try:
subprocess.call([myexec, '--version']
except OSError:
print "%s not found on path" % myexec
This is not a general solution, but will be the easiest way for a lot of use cases - those where the code needs to look for a single well known executable which is safe to run, or at least safe to run with a given flag.