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I'd like to be able to run "pydoc -b" in whatever directory I'm currently in. Most of the time that would be the root of my home directory, which is an ext4fs mount. So it has a subdirectory called "lost+found" for which I don't have any access permissions. As a result, the main pydoc info page will simply print an error message:
OSError: [Errno 13] Permission denied: './lost+found'
I'm not sure how best to address this. There are several possibilities that come to my mind:
 1. Provide a command line switch to strip '.' from sys.path.
 2. Skip any sys.path elements which cause exceptions, possibly
 printing a warning in addition to the remaining page content.
 3. Skip any single subdirectry which causes an exception,
 as this more closely models what importing by name would do.
 4. Explicitely skip lost+found, or perhaps any directory name which
 would be invalid as a module name.
Obviously, the workaround is to change to a sufficiently empty directory before starting pydoc. So this is a minor issue, but annoying nevertheless.

Do any of you three have anything to do with pydoc?
Given that the manual simply says "pydoc -b will start the server and additionally open a web browser to a module index page." without qualifications, quitting when started from certain locations strikes me as a bug. I do not see a reason to not just continue.

The server continues all right. It's the browser window which displays the error message. Not much better in my opinion, though.
To be completely accurate: currently the -b option doens't work as it should due to issue #11432. But using "-p 0" and opening the link manually is a suitable workaround for now.

This is essentially a duplicate of Issue11914. The root cause is that pkgutil.iter_modules doesn't deal with permission errors when traversing paths. Issue7367 is also related.

This problem has been fixed with the changes for Issue7367 and, for 2.7, Issue7425. They should appear in 3.3.0, 3.2.3, and 2.7.3.