Ran into this on macOS while trying to play around with the new posix_spawn bindings. It appears to me that the file_actions path is not what is being used by file_actions here.  It may be that I am misunderstanding something, but I thought I would bring it up.

Python 3.8.0a3 (v3.8.0a3:9a448855b5, Mar 25 2019, 17:05:20)
[Clang 6.0 (clang-600.0.57)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import os
>>> file_actions = [(os.POSIX_SPAWN_OPEN, 1, '.tmp/temp_file', os.O_CREAT | os.O_RDWR, 777)]
>>> os.posix_spawnp('whoami', ['whoami'], file_actions=file_actions)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: posix_spawnp() takes exactly 3 positional arguments (2 given)
>>> os.posix_spawnp('whoami', ['whoami'], os.environ, file_actions=file_actions)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
PermissionError: [Errno 13] Permission denied: 'whoami'

I have some updated information.  This works as expected when I set the permissions properly using an octal number 0o777.

The issue appears to be that when the permissions don't exist as specified, the PermissionError reports the process name, not the file path.

The error message is reporting the path.  However, it is only the path component that is specified in the call to the function.  

This behaviour is not limited to the posix_spawnp() function but happens with any interface that can look up a command in the path.  For instance, here's what subprocess.Popen() gives me when I look use it against a 0644 file that is present in my PATH:

>>> subprocess.Popen(['fever.py'])
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/usr/lib64/python3.7/subprocess.py", line 775, in __init__
    restore_signals, start_new_session)
  File "/usr/lib64/python3.7/subprocess.py", line 1522, in _execute_child
    raise child_exception_type(errno_num, err_msg, err_filename)
PermissionError: [Errno 13] Permission denied: 'fever.py'

Your example is an attempt to use Popen to run a file you don't have execute permissions for.

In my example, it is not `whoami` that it is failing to create/open, but '.tmp/temp_file'.  I would expect a `PermissionError: [Errno 13] Permission denied: '.tmp/temp_file'` returned.

Ah okay, I'll see what information posix_spawnp() (the C function) returns on error for that case.

Depending on your libc implementation and your libc version, you may get more or less info about what gone wrong.

The initial issue was not a bug but a mistake in the file mode. I close the issue.

Yeah, I've verified what Victor said about the OS not giving us enough information to tell what file is causing the issue.  However, I wonder if we should change the error message to be less confusing?  I'm a godawful C programmer but maybe something like this:

-        PyErr_SetFromErrnoWithFilenameObject(PyExc_OSError, path->object);
+        if (file_actionsp != NULL) {
+            /* OSErrors can be triggered by the program being invoked or by a
+             * problem with the files in file_actions.  Change the default
+             * error message so as not to confuse the programmer
+             */
+            if (path->narrow != NULL) {
+                char *err_msg_fmt = "While spawning %s\0";
+                unsigned int err_msg_size = strlen(path->narrow) + strlen(err_msg_fmt) + 1;
+                char* err_msg = malloc(err_msg_size);
+
+                PyOS_snprintf(err_msg, err_msg_size, err_msg_fmt, path->narrow);
+                /* Slight abuse, we're sending an error message rather than
+                 * a filename
+                 */
+                PyErr_SetFromErrnoWithFilename(PyExc_OSError, err_msg);
+            }
+        }
+        else
+        {
+            PyErr_SetFromErrnoWithFilenameObject(PyExc_OSError, path->object);
+        }


Which leads to output like this:

>>> import os
>>> file_actions = [(os.POSIX_SPAWN_OPEN, 1, '.tmp/temp_file', os.O_CREAT | os.O_RDWR, 777)]
>>> os.posix_spawnp('whoami', ['whoami'], os.environ, file_actions=file_actions)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
FileNotFoundError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: 'While spawning whoami'


I can submit a PR for that and people can teach me how to fix my C if it's considered useful.