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Misleading IOerror when opening a non-existent file for append?

Antoon Pardon apardon at forel.vub.ac.be
Tue Nov 21 09:03:04 EST 2006 
On 2006-11-21, jkn <jkn_gg at nicorp.f9.co.uk> wrote:
> Hi there
>     Thanks for the comments. I see that I actually confused myself a
> bit with my posting. It's been a while and I mistook the use of '/' as
> a platform-independent directory delimiter with the use of '\\'.
>
> I also thought that I was seeing something similar on Windows and
> Linux. This may not be the case ;-o.
>
> So, to try again. It looks as it the attempt to open a non-existent
> file (for instance, because the parent folder does not exist) gives an
> odd error on Linux but not on Windows.
>
> On Windows:
>
>> >>> f = file(r'c:\does-not-exist\DoesNotExist.txt','a')
>>
>> Traceback (most recent call last):
>>   File "<pyshell#0>", line 1, in <module>
>>     f = file(r'c:\does-not-exist\DoesNotExist.txt','a')
>> IOError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: 'c:\\does-not-exist
>> \\DoesNotExist.txt'
>> >>>
>
> (replacing the '\' with '/' gives the same message, which is what I was
> trying to convey)
>
> On Linux, you get the 'Bad mode' error.
>
>     Strange?!

Not on my box (Python 2.4.4c0):

>>> open("nodir/nofile", "a")
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
IOError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: 'nodir/nofile'

-- 
Antoon Pardon
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