Dear Steven, Thank you very much both for your answer and of course your comments. They are taken into account. I found out that when I touch FILENAME.sub in the command line, I get the same error. So I guess it isn't a problem with the language but rather deeper. I will solve this first before I come back. Just for completeness:
> Which part of the code fails? Please copy and paste the entire traceback, > starting with the line "Traceback (most recent call last)" and ending > with the complete error message. The code is corrected according to your advice: Here it the error: Traceback (most recent call last): File "createsubmitfiles.py", line 12, in <module> newfile=open(newname,'w') IOError: [Errno 27] File too large: 'FILENAME.sub;' I have changed the actual filename reported by the traceback. FILENAME.xml does exist before the code is run FILENAME.sub is not created FILENAME has a length of 160 characters I do have space to write all the files in the directory > Is filestring really a constant string like in the snippet above? Is > there any change that it could be an enormous string? Yes. It is a constant string > > I am pretty sure that the files is less than 1kB. > "Pretty sure"? You need to be 100% certain. We can't tell you whether > this is the case or not. When I do an ls -l before I run the code and after the code has failed, all I see are files with size <1kB. Makis -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list