title: Changing PYTHONPATH in shell
body: <p>I'm a completely new user to Python and shell scripts, and have run into a dead end with this, even after Googling the issue and banging my head against the desk a lot. Any help is appreciated!</p>
  
  <p>I'm running Python 2.7.3 on a shell that I SSH into; I downloaded some code to run a few programs/analyses. When I execute the initial program, I get the following error:</p>
  
  <pre><code>    Traceback (most recent call last):
      File "./[script1].py", line 7, in &lt;module&gt;
      import [script1]
      File "[directory]/[script].py", line 22, in &lt;module&gt;
      import gdata.spreadsheet.service
      ImportError: No module named gdata.spreadsheet.service
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>[Script 1] refers to a python script in the same folder that came as part of the code package, and it also calls the Google Data python package, which I've downloaded to the same folder and have gunzipped, tar unpacked, and then installed (with ./configure, etc.) Based on looking up the errors, my best guess is that there's something wrong with the PYTHONPATH here, and it's not finding [script1].py and the Gdata folder, even though both are within the same directory as the script I'm running. "Echo $PYTHONPATH" tells me that it's an undefined variable, and there's also a blank <strong>init</strong>.py file within the directory. There's no files containing the word "bash" or "bashrc" anywhere within that directory. Likewise, I can't seem to find any "sys.path" files, although when I boot up Python and print(sys.path) I get the resulting output:</p>
  
  <pre><code>['', 
  '/usr/lib/python2.7',
  '/usr/lib/python2.7/plat-linux2',
  '/usr/lib/python2.7/lib-tk',
  '/usr/lib/python2.7/lib-old',
  '/usr/lib/python2.7/lib-dynload',
  '/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages',
  '/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages',
  '/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/PIL',
  '/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/gst-0.10',
  '/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/gtk-2.0',
  '/usr/lib/pymodules/python2.7',
  '/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/ubuntu-sso-client',
  '/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/ubuntuone-client',
  '/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/ubuntuone-installer',
  '/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/ubuntuone-storage-protocol',
  '/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/wx-2.8-gtk2-unicode']
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I've also tried</p>
  
  <pre><code>export PYTHONPATH=[directory]
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>in my shell, but it spits out "export: command not found".</p>
  
  <p>Please forgive a newcomer to all this - any help on this (whether or not my suspicions are correct, and how to resolve them) would be greatly appreciated!</p>