fix: handle ENOTEMPTY errors in moveFile #8721
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Like EEXIST, we handle ENOTEMPTY when we fail to moveFile. A user reported they consistently could not update our CLI tool. [1] In that report it always had the same file it tried to rename to. I believe what is happening here is when NPM retires an old version it renames it to a deterministic path. However, I suspect a previous update was interrupted leaving a non-empty directory at the destination. When googling ENOTEMPTY all the results seem to be about npm failures with users suggesting clearing out node_modules. Maybe this will also solve those issues. [1]: https://gist.github.com/keegancsmith/5dac339583cc127031da6ed0e8512d47
owlstronaut
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Dec 5, 2025
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owlstronaut
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Good fix for a real user problem. Extending the EEXIST recovery logic to also handle ENOTEMPTY makes sense - both indicate the retirement path already has content from a previous interrupted install. Test coverage looks solid. Thanks!
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Like EEXIST, we handle ENOTEMPTY when we fail to moveFile.
A user reported they consistently could not update our CLI tool. 1 In that report it always had the same file it tried to rename to. I believe what is happening here is when NPM retires an old version it renames it to a deterministic path. However, I suspect a previous update was interrupted leaving a non-empty directory at the destination.
When googling ENOTEMPTY all the results seem to be about npm failures with users suggesting clearing out node_modules. Maybe this will also solve those issues.