Note: this is a technical post, to help poor souls that google this :)

When using nose on Solaris machines, simply running nosetests without specifying the file names will not work if you are the root user. To fix this, you must either not be root, or pass nose the argument --exe. That’s it.

Gory details: by default, nose ignores executable files. Each file it encounters it checks with os.access(test_file, os.X_OK) to see if it’s executable. Problem is that Solaris’ access function always returns success for root, regardless of actual file permissions. This is discouraged by POSIX, but known behavior.

Ensuring that you’re aware of known behaviours is crucial, as it prevents you from looking up issues with software unnecessarily. Of course, you can find these out on the web and it’s not difficult to test run them if you’re unsure what they’ll entail in terms of reversing the process or even repairing a bug or glitch yourself.

I hope this saves someone the 3 hours it wasted for me :)