Hi Padraig,
On 22/07/2026 21:51, Pádraig Brady wrote:
On 20/07/2026 18:12, Paul Holzinger via GNU coreutils Bug Reports wrote:
Hi,
I noticed that when chown'ing a directory tree recursively with many
files sometimes chown will exit 1 and report ENOENT errors. This happens
when looping over the directory results from readdir() and in a parallel
another process removes a file before the code then calls stat(),
chmod() or whatever syscalls the command has to do for the given
filename.
Since such race is expected the coreutils should not treat this as error
and just ignore them instead. That way a parallel removal of a file will
not make the commands return exit code 1 and thus possibility break
scripts. Of course this should only apply to files or directories under
the main path given as input, i.e. chmod -R dest should still fail with
ENOENT when dest does not exists.
Below is a reproducer for the commands, might needs to run a few times
until it triggers the race condition, I am not sure if there are more
commands in coreutils which are affected by this.
Thanks for the repro, it works well.
I agree, these commands shouldn't warn or fail for files
being added, replaced, removed in the tree being traversed.
I also notice that du is affected.
The attached should hopefully address this issue.
Thanks for the patch, I tested it with the reproducer and it works well.
I also agree with the other comments, just ignoring ENOENT is good
enough for me.
Thanks,
Paul Holzinger
