Getting “IOError: [Errno 13] Permission denied:..” when importing pandas.DataFrame

Question

I am getting

IOError: [Errno 13] Permission denied: \'/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/python_dateutil-2.2-py2.7.egg/EGG-INFO/top_level.txt\'

Answer 1

This is a known issue with python-dateutil where the permissions aren't set correctly in the pypi package: https://bugs.launchpad.net/dateutil/+bug/1243202. This isn't a problem with pip because pip normalizes permissions, but if you install it differently you might run into problems.

The easy solution is to run

sudo chmod o+r /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/python_dateutil-2.2-py2.7.egg/EGG-INFO/top_level.txt

and the same command on any other file you encounter with this problem in the dist-packages directory.