[New-bugs-announce] [issue37260] shutil.rmtree() FileNotFoundError race condition

[Jeffrey Kintscher]

New submission from Jeffrey Kintscher <websurfer at surf2c.net>:

shutil.rmtree() is susceptible to a race condition that can needlessly raise OSError:

1. os.scandir() returns the list of entries in a directory
2. while iterating over the list, another thread or process deletes one or more of the entries not yet iterated
3. os.unlink() or stat() raises OSError for the already deleted entry

It should check for and ignore, at a minimum, FileNotFoundError because we were going to delete the entry anyways.  For comparison, the 'rm -r' shell command handles this race condition by ignoring entries deleted from under it.

I will submit a PR when I work out some test cases to include.

----------
components: Library (Lib)
messages: 345445
nosy: Jeffrey.Kintscher, giampaolo.rodola, tarek
priority: normal
severity: normal
status: open
title: shutil.rmtree() FileNotFoundError race condition
versions: Python 3.7, Python 3.8, Python 3.9

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Python tracker <report at bugs.python.org>
<https://bugs.python.org/issue37260>
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