shutil: permission denied errors on windows

[Antoine De Groote]

Yes it's strange, I never had the problem before, either. It seems now 
to be only the case for folders. A very simple

shutil.copy('a', 'b')

already fails with the error message.

I reinstalled Python, but that didn't change anything...

Regards,
antoine

John Henry wrote:
> I use the copy function a lot and never have problem.  I suggest that
> you write a no brainer standalone test code and if it still fails
> there, then you have a problem with your installation.
> 
> Antoine De Groote wrote:
>> Google tells quite some things about it, but none of them are satisfactory.
>>
>> I'm on Windows, and shutil operations (e.g. move, copy) throw [Errno 13]
>> Permission denied all the time, for the source files. It seems that this
>> is the case for all my files. But what I don't understand is that
>> yesterday it still worked. I didn't change anything on my system though
>> (at least not that I am aware of). I restarted the computer several
>> times to see if that helped, but it didn't. Also I can't find a process
>> that would be using the files...
>>
>> Has anybody experienced this problem before, or have a solution?
>>
>> Kind regards,
>> antoine
>>
>> Here's the code that throws the errors
>>
>> [...]
>> for l in files:
>>              from_file = os.path.join(dir, l)
>>              to_file = from_file.replace(tree_top, backup_dir)
>>              try:
>>                  if not os.path.exists(to_file):
>>                      log('Copying new      %s' % from_file)
>>                      counter_new += 1
>>                      shutil.copy2(from_file, to_file)
>>                  elif int(os.path.getmtime(from_file)) >
>> int(os.path.getmtime(to_file)):
>>                      log('Copying modified %s' % from_file)
>>                      counter_mod += 1
>>                      shutil.copy2(from_file, to_file)
>>                  elif os.path.getsize(from_file) > os.path.getsize(to_file):
>>                      log('Sizes differ, but not rest: Copying %s' %
>> from_file)
>>                      counter_special += 1
>>                      shutil.copy2(from_file, to_file)
>>                  elif os.path.getsize(from_file) < os.path.getsize(to_file):
>>                      log('Orig file smaller than backup file: Copying
>> %s' % from_file)
>>                      counter_special += 1
>>                      shutil.copy2(to_file, backup_dir+'DIFF_SIZE')
>>                      shutil.copy2(from_file, to_file)
>>                  else:
>>                      #log('not treated: %s' % l)
>>                      pass
>>
>>              except (OSError, IOError), e:
>>                  not_accessible += 1
>>                  print e
>> [...]
>