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I'm implementing a safe rmtree using fwalk. Everything works perfectly except for one thing: if the directory contains dangling symlinks, fwalk goes belly-up:
$ ls -l test/
total 0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 vagrant vagrant 4 May 10 16:36 doesntwork -> this
$ ./python
Python 3.3.0a3+ (default:b32baa5b7626+, May 10 2012, 14:56:20) 
[GCC 4.6.3] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import os
[71253 refs]
>>> list(os.fwalk('test'))
Traceback (most recent call last):
 File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
 File "/home/vagrant/p/Lib/os.py", line 342, in fwalk
 for x in _fwalk(topfd, top, topdown, onerror, followlinks):
 File "/home/vagrant/p/Lib/os.py", line 361, in _walk
 if st.S_ISDIR(fstatat(topfd, name).st_mode):
FileNotFoundError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory
Unfortunately this makes it impossible to implement rmtree. The reason is the following code:
for name in names:
 # Here, we don't use AT_SYMLINK_NOFOLLOW to be consistent with
 # walk() which reports symlinks to directories as directories. We do
 # however check for symlinks before recursing into a subdirectory.
 if st.S_ISDIR(fstatat(topfd, name).st_mode):
 dirs.append(name)
 else:
 nondirs.append(name)
The "unsafe" walk tree uses os.path.isdir() instead of os.fstatat() and handles this case gracefully.
A simple try-except protection with a symlink check fixes it and the tests pass. This is a blocker for #4489. I have expanded the test of the WalkerTests suite.
Tested on Linux (= works) and OS X (= skipped).