I have pip version 19.0.3. I was prompted to update when using it to download pandas, and it seemed to fail partway through when I tried to update. Now, this error occurs whenever I try to reinstall, use pip, or even try to check what version I have. I deleted the two folders with pip, did not fix the problem. I even uninstalled python and reinstalled it to no success, I still get the same error. Any advice or solution is greatly appreciated, IT for my company was unable to provide a solution.
On Mac using brew is a better option as apt-get is not available. Command:
brew install python
In case you have both python2 & python3 installed on machine
python2.7 -m ensurepip --default-pip
simply should solve the issue.
If instead you are missing pip from python 3 then simply change python2.7 to python3 in the command above.