pip install pickle not working - no such file or directory

Checking on the interweb, I found this

A common pattern in Python 2.x is to have one version of a module implemented in pure Python, with an optional accelerated version implemented as a C extension; for example, pickle and cPickle.

This places the burden of importing the accelerated version and falling back on the pure Python version on each user of these modules. In Python 3.0, the accelerated versions are considered implementation details of the pure Python versions.

Users should always import the standard version, which attempts to import the accelerated version and falls back to the pure Python version. The pickle / cPickle pair received this treatment. The profile module is on the list for 3.1. The StringIO module has been turned into a class in the io module.

Which means in Python3 it comes as a library ...

import _pickle as cPickle

Update

As Invapid puts in the comments below, this one is similar to the answer above

from six.moves import cPickle

You can use:

pip install pickle-mixin

cPickle is part of Python's standard library; you do not install it with pip. In Python 2, it comes installed with Python. In Python 3, quoting the release notes with added emphasis:

A common pattern in Python 2.x is to have one version of a module implemented in pure Python, with an optional accelerated version implemented as a C extension; for example, pickle and cPickle. This places the burden of importing the accelerated version and falling back on the pure Python version on each user of these modules. In Python 3.0, the accelerated versions are considered implementation details of the pure Python versions. Users should always import the standard version, which attempts to import the accelerated version and falls back to the pure Python version. The pickle / cPickle pair received this treatment.

In the specific case of trying to install cpickle with pip, some Pythonista decided to inform people that this was the wrong thing to do and so registered the cpickle project (along with numerous others named after standard library modules) and gave it a setup.py that would do nothing but exit with the error "Package 'cpickle' must not be downloaded from pypi". However, something appears to have gone wrong either in creating the package or else on PyPI's end that has caused the source distribution file to be malformed, resulting in the error you see here. Thus, even if this error were fixed, you'd still get a different error telling you not to do what you're trying to do.