I recently encountered an IOError writing to a file on NFS. There wasn't a disk space or permission issue, so I assume this was just a network hiccup. The obvious solution is to wrap the write in a try-except, but I was curious whether the implementation of print and write in Python make either of the following more or less likely to raise IOError: f_print = open('print.txt', 'w') print >>f_print, 'test_print' f_print.close() vs. f_write = open('write.txt', 'w') f_write.write('test_write\n') f_write.close() (If it matters, specifically in Python 2.4 on Linux).