Such error is raised when you try to create a symlink in non-existent directory. For example, the following code will fail if /tmp/subdir doesn t exist:

os.symlink( /usr/bin/python ,  /tmp/subdir/python )

But this should run successfully:

src =  /usr/bin/python 
dst =  /tmp/subdir/python 

if not os.path.isdir(os.path.dirname(dst)):
    os.makedirs(os.path.dirname(dst))
os.symlink(src, dst)

The file doesn t need to exist in order to create the symlink. The following example demonstrates creating a symlink to a non-existing file:

First, check that there s no file named foobar in /home/wieslander/tmp:

[wieslander@rizzo tmp]$ ls -l /home/wieslander/tmp/foobar
ls: cannot access /home/wieslander/tmp/foobar: No such file or directory

Create a symlink named brokensymlink pointing to /home/wieslander/tmp/foobar:

[wieslander@rizzo tmp]$ python
Python 2.5.2 (r252:60911, Sep 30 2008, 15:42:03)
[GCC 4.3.2 20080917 (Red Hat 4.3.2-4)] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import os
>>> os.symlink( /home/wieslander/tmp/foobar ,  brokensymlink )

Check that the symlink was created and that the destination still doesn t exist:

[wieslander@rizzo tmp]$ ls -l brokensymlink
lrwxrwxrwx 1 wieslander wieslander 27 19 nov 13.13 brokensymlink -> /home/wieslander/tmp/foobar
[wieslander@rizzo tmp]$ ls -l /home/wieslander/tmp/foobar
ls: cannot access /home/wieslander/tmp/foobar: No such file or directory

Are you sure you are calling symlink with the right parameters?

os.symlink( /usr/bin/python ,  python )

This should create a symlink to /usr/bin/python from python in the current working directory.

This might be your answer:

$ python
Python 2.5.2 (r252:60911, Dec  2 2008, 09:26:14)
[GCC 3.4.4 (cygming special, gdc 0.12, using dmd 0.125)] on cygwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import os
>>> os.symlink( /this/does/not/exist ,  broken )
>>> os.symlink( broken ,  /this/does/not/exist )
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
OSError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory

Did you reverse the arguments? Or are you simply trying to create the symlink in a directory that does not exist?