Errno 13 Permission denied

[richorlin]

Running Calibre 2.5.6 on a Mac with OS X 10.11.4
When I try to delete a book from Calibre I get this error message"
ERROR: Unhanded Expression
OSError:[Errno 13] Permission denied:/Volumes/CAlibre Library deleted sEjAkU/New York Times (or whatever book I'm deleting)

I click on OK but the book is still in the Library until I close and reopen Calibre.

Appears to a python error (I think). How do I repair this?
Thanks in advance

[theducks]

The error MESSAGE is from Python

The error is from your system OS

That path looks odd to me (I am used to Windows and Linux)
Something (else) has the file open or locked.

You can't delete a book that is open in the Viewer or Editor
(closing Calibre, will allow the lock to go away)

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by theducks

You can't delete a book that is open in the Viewer or Editor
(closing Calibre, will allow the lock to go away)

On Windows you can delete a book if its EPUB is open in the Editor or the Viewer, but not if its DOCX is open in Word. Because Linux and OSX don't support file locking calibre doesn't lock any files.

Error 13 Permission denied is an access control error.

On Windows when calibre deletes a book it first creates a temporary folder with a random six character name, e.g. "sEjAkU". It moves the book files into it, and deletes that folder. Looks like OSX is getting hung up on removing the temporary folder.

Probably because OSX 'thinks' something is 'using' it. Could be calibre itself or OSX. More likely something like an AV, Spotlight indexer, Time Machine, or some other program that watches and acts on file system changes.

BR

I used to get the very same problem (without an error message) in my Windows file manager.

Folder deletes would 'fail' if I had the folder open before deleting it and the folder contained audio, video, pdfs etc. To complete the deletes I would have to exit and restart the file manager.

I fixed it by excluding the troublesome file types from the File Manager's Preview function. The preview handlers for audio, video and pdfs (WMP, PDF XChange etc) hang on to the file handles in case I want to preview them again. But I only ever want to preview text files, the file manager provides the handler for such. Oh, the image handler (Irfan) didn't hang on to any file handles.

Sometimes software is too clever by half

[kovidgoyal]

Check the permissions on your calibre library folder.

In a terminal, something like

chmod -R u+rw /path/to/library/folder will do the trick

[richorlin]

Thanks for the help but that didn't work. The only thing that worked was to move the library back to my internal drive and that seemed to work. I could delete a book without an error. This only started after I moved my library to an external drive attached to my Mac.

This is very weird...

[Grilgar]

Originally Posted by richorlin

Thanks for the help but that didn't work. The only thing that worked was to move the library back to my internal drive and that seemed to work. I could delete a book without an error. This only started after I moved my library to an external drive attached to my Mac.

This is very weird...

2 points:
1) If it's a network drive, that's not supported by Calibre. I use one and just deal with the occasional hiccup that causes.
2) I got this recently when I was having corruption issues on my network Calibre library drive. I had to directly attach the USB to my computer and run CHKDSK on it. Perhaps you can run the Mac equivalent.

[richorlin]

Problem solved: I had Calibre set up in the root directory of the drive. I moved it to a folder and the error dissappeared.