Articles/Python

FileNotFoundError in Python — What It Means and How to Fix It

What Python's FileNotFoundError exception means and how to resolve it.

Published October 27, 2026

FileNotFoundError is raised when trying to open a file that doesn't exist at the given path.

Key points

  • Catch it specifically with "except FileNotFoundError:" when you want to handle this exact case rather than a bare except

Example

open('missing.txt')  # FileNotFoundError
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