'mkdir -p fails when directory exists

On one of our remote systems mkdir -p $directory fails when the directory exists. which means it shows

mkdir: cannot create directory '$directory' : file exists

This is really puzzling, as I believed the contract of -p was that is always succeed when the directory already exists. And it works on the other systems I tried.

there is a user test on all of these systems, and directory=/home/test/tmp.

linuxshellmkdir


Solution 1:[1]

Check to see if there is a file (not a directory) with a name same as $directory.

Solution 2:[2]

Was your directory a FUSE-based network mount by any chance?

In addition to a file with that name already existing (other answer), this can happen when a FUSE process that once mounted something at this directory crashed (or was killed, e.g. with kill -9 or via the Linux OOM killer).

Check in mount if the FUSE mount is still listed there. If yes, you should be able to unmount it and fix the situation using fusermount -uz.

To see what is happening in detail, run strace -fy mkdir -p $directory, which shows all syscalls involved and their return values.

I consider the error messages emitted in this case a bug in mkdir -p (in particular the gnulib library):

When you run it on a dir that had a FUSE process mounted but that process crashed, it says

mkdir: cannot create directory ‘/mymount’: File exists

which is rather highly inaccurate, because the underlying stat() call returns ENOTCONN (Transport endpoint is not connected); but mkdir propagates up the less-specific error from the previous mkdir() sycall. It's extra confusing because the man page says:

   -p, --parents
          no error if existing, make parent directories as needed

so it shouldn't error if the dir exists, yet ls -l / shows:

d????????? ? ?    ?       ?            ? files

so according to this (d), it is a directory, but it isn't according to test -d.

I believe a better error message (which mkdir -p should emit in this case) would be:

mkdir: cannot create directory ‘/mymount’: Transport endpoint is not connected

Solution 3:[3]

mkdir -p won't create directory if there is a file with the same name is existing in the same directory. Otherwise it will work as expected.

Sources

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Source: Stack Overflow

Solution Source
Solution 1 DWright
Solution 2
Solution 3 ASHU

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