The My Documents directory is not guaranteed to be named "Documents". On older versions of windows it was "My Documents", and on foreign versions of windows it is a name in their language.
The correct way to get the path of this folder is, for example (couldn't test since I'm on a mac right now) import ctypes from ctypes import wintypes CSIDL_PERSONAL = 5 SHGetFolderPath = ctypes.windll.shell32.SHGetFolderPathW pszPath = ctypes.create_unicode_buffer(wintypes.MAX_PATH) SHGetFolderPath.argtypes = [wintypes.HWND, ctypes.c_int, wintypes.HANDLE, wintypes.DWORD, LPWSTR] SHGetFolderPath.restype = wintypes.HRESULT hResult = SHGetFolderPath(0, CSIDL_PERSONAL, 0, 0, pszPath) if hResult == 0: print pszPath.value else raise OSError("Could not find My Documents directory") Linux systems generally provide their own way to get it (e.g. xdg-user-dirs), on OSX everything I can find indicates it really is always ~/Documents . -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list