There are actually two distinct issues. For the first one, the problem is really a distribution issue: the libc is more recent than the kernel, and exports *utimes() whereas the kernel doesn't implement those syscalls, which results in ENOSYS. I don't like the idea of adding explicit check for this, because any syscall can fail with ENOSYS (we've had recently pipe2(), accept4(), etc). It's really a distribution issue. For the second one, it seems that RHEL6.4 doesn't have utime() anymore, which I find really strange (although POSIX.1-2008 marks utime() as obsolete). Could you provide the output of: $ strace ./python -c "import os; os.utime('.')"