Below conan cmd failed with invalid syntax, but that file is not created by me. Not sure why below error is appearing.
$ conan inspect poco/1.9.4
poco/1.9.4: Not found in local cache, looking in remotes...
poco/1.9.4: Trying with 'conancenter'...
Downloading conanmanifest.txt completed [0.74k]
Downloading conanfile.py completed [14.36k]
Downloading conan_export.tgz completed [0.30k]
Decompressing conan_export.tgz completed [0.00k]
poco/1.9.4: Downloaded recipe revision 0
ERROR: Error loading conanfile at '/home/snandi/.conan/data/poco/1.9.4/_/_/export/conanfile.py': Unable to load conanfile in /home/snandi/.conan/data/poco/1.9.4/_/_/export/conanfile.py
File "/home/snandi/.conan/data/poco/1.9.4/_/_/export/conanfile.py", line 97
tools.get(**self.conan_data["sources"][self.version],
^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax
Your error occurs because Python 2 can not parse **self.conan_data due unpack feature improvement introduced on Python 3.5 (PEP 448), you have to use Python 3 only.
You can validate it simply running:
$ python2
Python 2.7.18 (default, Mar 24 2021, 14:28:23)
[GCC 10.2.0] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> dict(**{'x': 1}, y=2, **{'z': 3})
File "<stdin>", line 1
dict(**{'x': 1}, y=2, **{'z': 3})
^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax
$ python3
Python 3.9.6 (default, Jun 30 2021, 10:22:16)
[GCC 11.1.0] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> dict(**{'x': 1}, y=2, **{'z': 3})
{'x': 1, 'y': 2, 'z': 3}
Thus, to solve your problem:
First, uninstall Conan from python2: python2 -m pip uninstall conan
Then, keep only the python 3 version installed: python3 -m pip install -U conan
If you have some difficult managing your Python environment in your host, I would suggest using pyenv, which manage the global version installed.