rm: misleading error message when removing file from unwritable directory #7307
Description
Environment: Ubuntu 24.04, uutils main branch (git commit 0eab0fa), GNU coreutils v9.4
Steps to reproduce:
mkdir -p a/b
touch a/b/file
chmod a-w a/b
rm -rf a
What happens now: uutils rm terminates with an error message about the top level directory:
rm: cannot remove 'a': Permission denied
What I expected to happen: GNU rm terminates with an error message about the innermost file:
rm: cannot remove 'a/b/file': Permission denied
Notes: this should cause a failure in GNU test file tests/rm/cycle.sh, but we are replacing the a/b/file in the expected error message with a
Line 204 in 0eab0fa
cannot remove 'a' is misleading, and the original GNU error message seems to better match the conceptual model of how rm -r should work: it is a post-order tree traversal, and the leaf node cannot be removed because its parent directory does not allow writes.