I ran the example from here; http://conda.pydata.org/docs/index.html
I'm on a Mac, 10.8.5. I might definitely have squashed something because I initially had troubles with my Anaconda, but I thought it was now working. Just to sanity check, I ran the example shown in the help, above. It merely creates a new conda environment with an older numpy version and then shows how source activate [env] can get the preferred item.
In my case, everything seemed to run fine, but the version of numpy stayed the same. Any thoughts? Thank you so much in advance!
$ ~/anaconda/bin/python2.7 Python 2.7.6 |Anaconda 1.9.2 (x86_64)| (default, Jan 10 2014, 11:23:15) [GCC 4.0.1 (Apple Inc. build 5493)] on darwin Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. >>> import numpy nu>>> numpy.__version__ '1.8.1' >>> quit() $ conda create -p ~/anaconda/envs/trynum16 numpy=1.6 anaconda $ source activate ~/anaconda/envs/trynum16 discarding ~/anaconda/bin from PATH prepending ~/anaconda/envs/trynum16/bin to PATH (~/anaconda/envs/trynum16):~ $ echo $PATH ~/anaconda/envs/trynum16/bin:/usr/local/bin:/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/opt/X11/bin:/usr/local/git/bin:/bin (~/anaconda/envs/trynum16):~ $ python Python 2.7.5 |Anaconda 1.8.0 (x86_64)| (default, Oct 24 2013, 07:02:20) [GCC 4.0.1 (Apple Inc. build 5493)] on darwin Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. >>> import numpy >>> numpy.__version__ '1.8.1' >>> quit() (~/anaconda/envs/trynum16):~ $ echo $PATH ~/anaconda/envs/trynum16/bin:/usr/local/bin:/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/opt/X11/bin:/usr/local/git/bin:/bin (~/anaconda/envs/trynum16):~ $ source deactivate discarding ~/anaconda/envs/trynum16/bin from PATH $ echo $PATH ~/anaconda/bin:/usr/local/bin:/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/opt/X11/bin:/usr/local/git/bin:/bin