NFS on certain platforms (most notably AIX, Solaris) use .nfsXXXXX files that appear and disappear automagically.  distutils can get confused by that once a .nfsXXXXX file was earlier seen with listdir and then removed by the OS before its copied.

Simply ignore .nfsXXXXX files as workaround.

Here is the applicable patch against py3k branch.

Thanks for the report and patch (I think SilentGhost’s version is better).  Do you have any pointer about those .nfs* files?  Are there other (build) tools that ignore them?  Is it always safe to skip .nfs* files, or only .nfs????? (i.e. six characters)?

Aside from those questions, a patch requires a test and doc update.  See guidelines at http://wiki.python.org/moin/Distutils/FixingBugs

On Tue, Feb 8, 2011 at 23:40, Éric Araujo <report@bugs.python.org> wrote:
>
> Éric Araujo <merwok@netwok.org> added the comment:
>
> Do you have any pointer about those .nfs* files?  Are there other (build) tools that ignore them?  Is it always safe to skip .nfs* files, or only .nfs????? (i.e. six characters)?

Just replying for this part: .nfs* files are created by the nfs server
when on of its client removes a file while another client has the very
same file opened. the nfs server keeps the .nfs* file around until the
last client closes the file, after that it removes the .nfs* file.

About the number of digits after '.nfs' I'm not sure there's a
standard for it, but I saw files with more that 6 chars after that.

Regards,
-- 
Sandro Tosi (aka morph, morpheus, matrixhasu)
My website: http://matrixhasu.altervista.org/
Me at Debian: http://wiki.debian.org/SandroTosi

Review of both patches (python-2.5.1-distutils-aixnfs.patch and dir_util.py.diff) as they are essentially the same:

I think that the test is in wrong place: we would want to ignore those .nfs* files always, not just when checking for symlinks. A separate test
at the top of the loop would be better:
    for n in names:
+       if n.startswith('.nfs'):
+           continue
        src_name = os.path.join(src, n)
        dst_name = os.path.join(dst, n)
        if preserve_symlinks and os.path.islink(src_name):


BTW: under linux 2.6.20 I see files like: .nfs000000000592413900000036, always of this length, with hexadecimal digits after .nfs).