Re: Bug in rm -rf

[Jim Meyering]

Geoffrey Odhner <address@hidden> wrote:
> I have encountered a bug with the rm command.  If I unpack the
> coreutils-5.0 in a directory named .temp (I haven't tried any other
> names for this bug) and then from the parent of the .temp directory say:
>
>     rm -rf .temp/
>
> then I get the following message:
>
>     rm: cannot remove directory `.temp//coreutils-5.0/lib': Directory
>     not empty
>
> Then I say:
>
>     rm -rf .temp/coreutils-5.0/
>
> and it succeeds.  On the other hand, if I initially say:
>
>     rm -rf .temp
>
> then it works sometimes.
>
> I am running MacOS X 10.3.8 on a 667MHz PPC 15" Titanium PowerBook.  Let
> me know if there is any other information I can provide to assist.

Thanks for the report.
That's due to a bug in their implementation of readdir.
With the work-around in the latest test release, GNU rm works
fine even there:

  ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-5.3.0.tar.gz
  ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-5.3.0.tar.bz2