the net effect of all of this is that both the pythonpath and path file components of the search path allow you to tailor the places where imports look for files the way you set environment variables and where you store path files varies per platform for instanceon windowsyou might use your control panel' system icon to set pythonpath to list of directories separated by semicolonslike thisc:\pycode\utilities; :\pycode\package or you might instead create text file called :\python \pydirs pthwhich looks like thisc:\pycode\utilities :\pycode\package these settings are analogous on other platformsbut the details can vary too widely for us to cover in this see appendix for pointers on extending your module search path with pythonpath or pth files on various platforms search path variations this description of the module search path is accuratebut genericthe exact configuration of the search path is prone to changing across platformspython releasesand even python implementations depending on your platformadditional directories may automatically be added to the module search path as well for instancesome pythons may add an entry for the current working directory--the directory from which you launched your program--in the search path before the pythonpath directories when you're launching from command linethe current working directory may not be the same as the home directory of your top-level file ( the directory where your program file resides)which is always added because the current working directory can vary each time your program runsyou normally shouldn' depend on its value for import purposes see for more on launching programs from command lines to see how your python configures the module search path on your platformyou can always inspect sys path--the topic of the next section the sys path list if you want to see how the module search path is truly configured on your machineyou can always inspect the path as python knows it by printing the built-in sys path also watch for ' discussion of the new relative import syntax and search rules in python xthey modify the search path for from statements in files inside packages when characters are used ( from import stringby defaulta package' own directory is not automatically searched by imports in python xunless such relative imports are used by files in the package itself the module search path