ImportError: No module named subprocess

Question

it is quite a long time now, that on my installation of python 2.7 on ubuntu 12.10 the subprocess module is missing, I do not need to use it, but many programs I use do it, then they do not work any more, googling quite a lot, I realized that in my installation there is something that is in conflict, but I have not been able to understand what. I have other version of python installed, but I can't remove them with synaptic, because with I would have to remove too many other packages.

Solution

Using dpkg you can find to which package subprocess.py belonged:

dpkg -S /usr/lib/python2.7/subprocess.py

Then use the --reinstall option to get the package python2.7-minimal back without breaking dependencies:

apt-get install --reinstall python2.7-minimal