If the current directory does not exist, rm fails immediately. This is a result of a bad security fix for fileutils 4.1 and is fixed in 4.5 and later. The problem is only on AS2.1 A trivial testcase to reproduce this problem is: [0] gmarsden@ca-build1:/tmp$ mkdir rmtest [0] gmarsden@ca-build1:/tmp$ cd rmtest/ [0] gmarsden@ca-build1:/tmp/rmtest$ touch /tmp/file1 [0] gmarsden@ca-build1:/tmp/rmtest$ chmod 0 . [0] gmarsden@ca-build1:/tmp/rmtest$ rm -f /tmp/file1 rm: cannot lstat `.': Permission denied [1] gmarsden@ca-build1:/tmp/rmtest$ ls -l /tmp/file1 -rw-rw-r-- 1 gmarsden gmarsden 0 May 7 18:52 /tmp/file1 The offending code is actually flagged with a FIXME in the AS2.1 fileutils package and results from attempting to do an lstat on the current directory to prevent a security exploit. However, this check should not happen when not removing recursive directories. Please fix or upgrade AS2.1 fileutils to 4.5.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 84552 ***
Changed to 'CLOSED' state since 'RESOLVED' has been deprecated.