Permission denied when installing Pylint on VSCode

Question

When trying to enable linting with Pylint, and format on save with autopep8, neither will install because of a permission denied error.

Pylint:

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IOError: [Errno 13] Permission denied: '/Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/mccabe.py'

Autopep8:

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IOError: [Errno 13] Permission denied: '/Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/pep8.py'

Answer 1

You can press ⬆ (up arrow key) in the terminal tab after the install fails to return to the command that it ran. In this case:

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/usr/bin/python -m pip install pylint

Press fn+⬅ (left arrow key) to jump to the beginning of the line, then insert a 'sudo ' (no quotes, but including the trailing space) in front of the command, and press enter to re-run the command as root -- it should look like this:

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sudo /usr/bin/python -m pip install pylint

You will be prompted for your password then the package will be installed without permissions errors.

Answer 2

Run this command:

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sudo chown -R $USER /Library/Python/2.7