# Ansible on Xenial can no longer find six\_py file

**URL:** <https://forum.ansible.com/t/ansible-on-xenial-can-no-longer-find-six-py-file/24045>\
**Category:** Ansible Project\
**Tags:** ubuntu\
**Created:** [March 23, 2017, 3:54pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/ansible-on-xenial-can-no-longer-find-six-py-file/24045 "2017-03-23T15:54:22Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Charles\_Appel](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/3ab097/32.png) [@Charles\_Appel](https://forum.ansible.com/u/Charles_Appel)\
**Post date:** [March 23, 2017, 3:54pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/ansible-on-xenial-can-no-longer-find-six-py-file/24045/1 "2017-03-23T15:54:22Z")

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Last I used ansible was three days ago; this morning I attempted to run and receive the following error:

ansible --version  
Traceback (most recent call last):  
File “/usr/bin/ansible”, line 43, in   
import ansible.constants as C  
File “/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/ansible/constants.py”, line 26, in   
from ansible.compat.six import string\_types  
File “/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/ansible/compat/six/ **init**.py”, line 54, in   
exec(open(six\_py\_file, ‘rb’).read())  
IOError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: ‘/usr/bin/six.py’

My current setup is Ubuntu 16.04.2 with all updates as of today. Ansible comes from [ppa.launchpad.net/ansible/ansible/ubuntu](http://ppa.launchpad.net/ansible/ansible/ubuntu) xenial main. Other version information is:

$ pip show ansible

---

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**Author:** ![John\_Hardt](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/ce73a5/32.png) [@John\_Hardt](https://forum.ansible.com/u/John_Hardt)\
**Post date:** [May 22, 2017, 5:42pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/ansible-on-xenial-can-no-longer-find-six-py-file/24045/2 "2017-05-22T17:42:40Z")

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I ran into the identical problem on RHEL7. What I found was that installing the VMware-vSphere-CLI-6.5.0 installed the following files:

lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 26 May 18 23:20 /usr/bin/six.pyc → /opt/vmwarecli/bin/six.pyc  
-r–r–r–. 1 root root 31988 May 18 23:20 /opt/vmwarecli/bin/six.pyc

There was no /usr/bin/six.py nor /opt/vmwarecli/bin/six.py, so I did this.

$ sudo mv /usr/bin/six.pyc /usr/bin/six.pyc.broken

The VMware CLI still works, and now ansible works again.

$ ansible --version  
ansible 2.3.0.0  
config file = /etc/ansible/ansible.cfg  
configured module search path = Default w/o overrides  
python version = 2.7.5 (default, Aug 2 2016, 04:20:16) [GCC 4.8.5 20150623 (Red Hat 4.8.5-4)]

-john