Permission Denied trying to run Python on Windows 10

Question

Seems as though an update on Windows 10 overnight broke Python  Just trying to run python --version returned a  Permission Denied  error   None of the three updates  KB4507453  KB4506991  or KB4509096 look like they d be the culprit but the timing of the issue is suspicious  Rather than messing with rolling back  I m hoping there s a simpler fix that I m missing   The permissions on python are  -rwxr-xr-x  and I haven t changed anything besides letting the Windows update reboot machine after installing last night s patches   According to the System Information  I m running 10 0 18362  Should also note that this is happening whether I  try  to execute Python from git-bash using  run as administrator  or not  and if I try using PowerShell  it just opens the Windows store as if the app isn t installed so I m thinking it can t see the contents of my  c Users david AppData Local Microsoft WindowsApps  folder for some reason   I ve also tried to reinstall Python 3 7 4  but that didn t help either  Is there something else I should be looking at

User · Answer

This is due to the way Windows App Execution Aliases work in Git-Bash  It is a known issue in MSYS2 failing to access Windows reparse points with IO REPARSE TAG APPEXECLINK As a workaround  you can alias to a function invocation that uses cmd exe under the hood  Add the following to your    bashrc file   function python   cmd exe  c  quot python  1  2  3 quot     For python  I d recommend just toggling off app execution aliases as in the accepted answer  but for libraries that are distributed exclusively through the windows store like winget  this is your best option  Further Reading  bash  Local Microsoft WindowsApps python3  Permission denied Permission Denied when running from bash winget does not run in WSL2 due to exec format error  234

User · Answer

This issue is far too common to still be persistent  And most answers and instructions fail to address it  Here s what to do on Windows 10    Type environment variables in the start search bar  and open Edit the System Environment Variables   Click Environment Variables    In the System Variables section  locate the variable with the key Path and double click it  Look for paths pointing to python files  Likely there are none  If there are  select and delete them  Create a new variable set to the path to your python executable  Normally this is C  Users  YOUR USERNAME HERE  AppData Local Programs Python Python38  Ensure this by checking via your File Explorer    Note  If you can t see AppData  it s because you ve not enabled viewing of hidden items  click the View tab and tick the Hidden Items checkbox  Create another variable pointing to the Scripts directory  Typically it is C  Users  YOUR USERNAME HERE  AppData Local Programs Python Scripts  Restart your terminal and try typing py  python  python3  or python exe

User · Answer

For me  I tried manage app execution aliases and got an error that python3 is not a command so for that  I used py instead of python3 and it worked I don t know why this is happening but It worked for me

User · Answer

This appears to be a limitation in git-bash  The recommendation to use winpty python exe worked for me  See Python not working in the command line of git bash for additional information

User · Answer

Simple answer  replace python with PY everything will work as expected

User · Answer

I experienced the same issue  but in addition to Python being blocked  all programs in the Scripts folder were too  The other answers about aliases  path and winpty didn t help  I finally found that it was my antivirus  Avast  which decided overnight for some reason to just block all compiled python scripts for some reason  The fix is fortunately easy  simply whitelist the whole Python directory  See here for a full explanation

User · Answer

May be you can try opening command prompt with Administrator privileges   Run As Administrator   Works for me most of the time

User · Answer

Research  All of the files in  USERPROFILE  AppData Local Microsoft WindowsApps are placeholders that point to files that are actually located somewhere in C  Program Files WindowsApps  which happens to be denied permissions completely   It appears I was on the right track with my statement made in my duplicate of this problem       Seems like they didn t really think about the distribution method screwing with permissions     Source  Cannot install pylint in Git Bash on Windows  Windows Store   Permissions are screwed up royally because of the WindowsApps distribution method      Interestingly it says that the  Users  group can read and execute files  as well as my specific user  but the Administrators group can only List folder contents for some hilariously unfathomable reason  And when trying to access the folder in File Explorer  it refuses to even show the folder contents  so there s something fishy about that as well   Interestingly  even though executing python in CMD works just fine  the  WindowsApps  folder does not show up when listing the files in the directory it resides in  and attempting to navigate into the folder generates a  Permission denied  error     Attempting to change the permissions requires changing the owner first  so I changed the owner to the Administrators group  After that  I attempted to change the permissions for the Administrators group to include Full control  but it was unable to change this  because  access was denied   duh  Micro ucks  that s what we re trying to change       This permission error happened for so many files that I used Alt C to quickly click  Continue  on repeat messages  but this still took too long  so I canceled the process  resulting in this warning message popping up     And now I am unable to set the TrustedInstaller user back as the owner of the WindowsApps folder  because it doesn t show up in the list of Users Groups Built-in security principles Other objects        Actually  according to this tutorial  you can swap the owner back to TrustedInstaller by typing NT Service TrustedInstaller into the object name text box   Solution  There is no solution  Basically  we are completely screwed  Classy move  Microsoft

User · Answer

Adding the Local Python Path before the WindowsApps resolved the problem

User · Answer

save you time   use wsl  and vscode remote extension to properly work with python even with win10  and dont t forget virtualenv  useful https   linuxize com post how-to-install-visual-studio-code-on-ubuntu-18-04

User · Answer

The simplest thing to do would be to modify your PATH and PYTHONPATH environmental variables to make sure that the folder containing the proper python binaries are searched befor the local WindowsApp folder   You can access the environmental variables by opening up the control panel and searching for  env

User · Answer

Workaround  If you have installed python from exe follow below steps  Step 1  Uninstall python Step 2  Install python and check Python path check box as highlighted in below screentshot yellow   This solved me the problem

User · Answer

It s not a solution with PowerShell  but I had the same problem except with MINGW64  I got around it by switching to Windows Subsystem for Linux  which I wanted to do anyways  as my terminal  just generally and in VSCode  This post describes it well   How to configure VS Code  windows  to use Ubuntu App as terminal  In summary   1  Install Ubuntu from the Windows App Store  2  Change the default bash from CMD -  wslconfig  setdefault Ubuntu  --- For VSCode   3  Restart VSCode  4  In VSCode change  terminal integrated shell windows  to  C  WINDOWS System32 bash exe   for further details see the post above   Running smoothly now in VSCode and WSL  Bash on Ubuntu on Windows   Might be at least a temporary solution for you

User · Answer

As far as I can tell  this was caused by a conflict with the version of Python 3 7 that was recently added into the Windows Store  It looks like this added two  stubs  called python exe and python3 exe into the  USERPROFILE  AppData Local Microsoft WindowsApps folder  and in my case  this was inserted before my existing Python executable s entry in the PATH   Moving this entry below the correct Python folder  partially  corrected the issue   The second part of correcting it is to type manage app execution aliases into the Windows search prompt and disable the store versions of Python altogether     It s possible that you ll only need to do the second part  but on my system I made both changes and everything is back to normal now

User · Answer

I had this to Run  execute but was not working python3 -m http server 8080  after reading and trying some of the solutions above and did not worked   what worked for me was python -m http server 8080

User · Answer

Add the path of python folder in environmental variable and it will work 1 search environmental variable 2 look for system variable section and find variable named path in it 3 double click on path and add new path which directs towards python folder and that s it  the python folder is usually in C  Users  quot user name quot   AppData Local Programs Python Python39

[python-3.x] "Permission Denied" trying to run Python on Windows 10

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