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

[jkn]

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?!

    Jon N