Original Post Here
Got a new MacBook Air today and was messing around with it. I installed Xcode tools and it populated /usr/bin/python3.
I use python3 and would like the default behavior when calling python from my terminal to call python3. I look at the $PATH variable and $ echo $PATH returns /usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin. So I'm thinking "This'll be easy. I'll create a symbolic link from /usr/bin/python3 to /usr/local/bin/python". Here's where things started to not make sense.
user@machine bin % /usr/bin/python3 --version
Python 3.8.2
user@machine bin % pwd
/usr/local/bin
user@machine bin % ls -la
...
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 16 Sep 13 23:28 python -> /usr/bin/python3
...
user@machine bin % /usr/local/bin/python --version
Python 2.7.16
/usr/local/bin/python is pointing too /usr/bin/python3 but it's acting like it's pointing to /usr/bin/python. Is there anything obvious that I'm missing here? Why am I getting this behavior? What can I do to fix it?