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help / color / mirror / Atom feedFrom: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
To: pgsql-committers@lists.postgresql.org
Subject: pgsql: Make pg_mkdir_p() tolerant of a concurrent directory creation.
Date: Fri, 19 Jun 2026 16:52:16 +0000
Message-ID: <E1wacS0-0011KL-0B@gemulon.postgresql.org> (raw)
Make pg_mkdir_p() tolerant of a concurrent directory creation.
pg_mkdir_p creates each missing path component with a stat() followed
by mkdir(). If the stat() reports the component as absent but another
process creates it in the window before this process's mkdir(), mkdir()
fails with EEXIST and pg_mkdir_p treated that as a hard error -- unlike
"mkdir -p", which is meant to be idempotent and race-tolerant.
This shows up when several processes concurrently create paths that
share an ancestor directory: for example, parallel initdb runs whose
data directories live under a common temporary directory. One process
wins the race to create the shared ancestor and the others fail with
could not create directory "...": File exists
Fix this race condition by first trying mkdir() and only attempting
stat() if it fails with EEXIST.
On Windows, there's an additional problem: stat() opens a file handle
and participates in share-mode locking, which means it can transiently
fail on a directory another process is concurrently creating. Use
GetFileAttributes() instead: it requests only FILE_READ_ATTRIBUTES
and is exempt from share-mode denial, so it reliably sees a
concurrently-created directory.
I (tgl) also chose to back-patch 039f7ee0f's effects on this function,
so that pgmkdirp.c remains identical in all live branches.
Author: Andrew Dunstan <andrew@dunslane.net>
Co-authored-by: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/3ca004de-e49b-4471-b8aa-fd656e70f68c@dunslane.net
Backpatch-through: 14
Branch
------
REL_14_STABLE
Details
-------
https://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/4b3bc6b714531438cee299648f12e70c5cc38ebb
Modified Files
--------------
src/port/pgmkdirp.c | 49 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++--------------
1 file changed, 35 insertions(+), 14 deletions(-)
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To: pgsql-committers@postgresql.org
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Subject: Re: pgsql: Make pg_mkdir_p() tolerant of a concurrent directory creation.
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