bug#81444: chown, chmod, chgrp, chcon, ls: --recursive walk does not ignore ENOENT errors

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