Getting a "Cannot be Opened"" error Message

[Ofnuts]

It's on a linux host that i access remotely. 
below are the permissions

total 3
-rwxr-xr-x 1 psimo it117-1G  602 Feb  9 05:57 hw2.py
-rw-r--r-- 1 psimo it117-1G 1214 Feb  3 21:07 red_sox.txt

This is irrelevant. See buran's answer. Your try/except is catching all errors, and the code wrongly assumes that they can only mean that the file cannot be opened. In that case the exception comes from an error in your code... You should only be catching exceptions of type IOError, so that errors from your code are duly reported.