portable way of locating an executable (like which)

[Jason Swails]

On Thu, Sep 20, 2012 at 5:06 PM, Gelonida N <gelonida at gmail.com> wrote:

> I'd like to implement the equivalent functionality of the unix command
> /usr/bin/which
>
> The function should work under Linux and under windows.
>
> Did anybody already implement such a function.
> If not, is there a portable way of splitting the environment variable PATH?
>

I've used the following in programs I write:

def which(program):
   def is_exe(fpath):
      return os.path.exists(fpath) and os.access(fpath, os.X_OK)

   fpath, fname = os.path.split(program)
   if fpath:
      if is_exe(program):
         return program
   else:
      for path in os.getenv("PATH").split(os.pathsep):
         exe_file = os.path.join(path, program)
         if is_exe(exe_file):
            return exe_file
   return None

IIRC, I adapted it from StackOverflow.  I know it works on Linux and Mac OS
X, but not sure about windows (since I don't know if PATH works the same
way there).

HTH,
Jason
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