FileNotFoundError WinError 2 The system cannot find the file specified

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In this tutorial, we will learn about how to fix the error “FileNotFoundError WinError 2 The system cannot find the file specified”. This error is very specific to Windows operating system. When you try to do any operation on a file which does not exist or Python is not able to locate, it will throw this error. We will look into more detail about the issue and the fix for the error in the upcoming section.

Why “FileNotFoundError WinError 2” Error Occurs?

The ‘FileNotFoundError WinError 2 The system cannot find the file specified’ error occurs in Python on Windows operating system when you attempt to access or manipulate a file that does not exist in the specified directory. This can happen when you try to open, read, write or perform any file-related operation on a file that has not been created or is not present in the specified location.

In this tutorial, we will reproduce the issue by using example code. We will create a Python code to rename the files in a specified path. Let us look at the below code.

Reproduce Error

import os
def rename(directory):
    for name in os.listdir(directory):

        try:
            print("File before renaming: ",name)
            new_name = "Python" + name
            output = os.rename(name, new_name)
            print("File after renaming: ", new_name, "\n")

        except Exception as e:
            print(f"Error: {e}")

path = r"C:\Users\linuxnasa\Desktop\Files"
rename(path)

OUTPUT:

> python .\rename-file.py
File before renaming: file1.txt
Error: [WinError 2] The system cannot find the file specified: 'file1.txt' -> 'Pythonfile1.txt'
File before renaming: file2.txt
Error: [WinError 2] The system cannot find the file specified: 'file2.txt' -> 'Pythonfile2.txt'

In the above output, Python is unable to locate the absolute path of ‘new_name‘ file . It tries to look into the current working directory. As our current working directory is different from specified directory which is passed an an argument to the rename() function, file lookup will fail. We will next look at the solution to fix this issue.