pip or pip3 to install packages for Python 3?

Your pip is a soft link to the same executable file path with pip3.you can use the commands below to check where your pip and pip3 real paths are:

$ ls -l `which pip`$ ls -l `which pip3`

You may also use the commands below to know more details:

$ pip show pip$ pip3 show pip

When we install different versions of python, we may create such soft links to

• set default pip to some version.
• make different links for different versions.

It is the same situation with python, python2, python3

More information below if you're interested in how it happens in different cases:

• MacOS/Homebrew
• Fedora/CentOS
• Debian/Ubuntu

If you had python 2.x and then installed python3, your pip will be pointing to pip3. you can verify that by typing pip --version which would be the same as pip3 --version.

On your system you have now pip, pip2 and pip3.

If you want you can change pip to point to pip2 instead of pip3.

When you install python3, pip3 gets installed. And if you don't have another python installation(like python2.7) then a link is created which points pip to pip3.

So pip is a link to to pip3 if there is no other version of python installed(other than python3).pip generally points to the first installation.