In another bug I was investigating issues with shutil.rmtree on Windows. I saw clobber.py's use of mozfile.remove() and attempted to use that, but it gave the same problems as rmtree. Switching to use `winrm.exe` as clobberer does, handles the issue correctly. In this case I was testing removing the node_modules directory. In the directory, there's a couple of symlinked directories: node_modules/eslint-plugin-mozilla node_modules/eslint-plugin-spidermonkey-js These point to their respective directories in tools/lint/eslint. They are symlinks that are set up by npm install. Running mozfile.remove('/path/to/node_modules') causes the contents of: tools/lint/eslint/eslint-plugin-mozilla tools/lint/eslint/eslint-plugin-spidermonkey-js to be removed as well as the entirety of node_modules when run on Windows. Running the same code on Mac works correctly.

mozfile.remove uses os.path.islink to determine if the path is a symlink. os.path.islink did not support Windows native symlinks until Python 3.2. What version of Python are you using?

I'd have been using Python 2.7, since that's the standard baseline that Mozilla supports at the moment.

The line of code referenced in comment 1 is here: https://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/c291143e24019097d087f9307e59b49facaf90cb/testing/mozbase/mozfile/mozfile/mozfile.py#214 I wrote some sample code for detecting symlinks on Windows and tested it locally: ``` import platform INVALID_FILE_ATTRIBUTES = -1 FILE_ATTRIBUTE_REPARSE_POINT = 0x400 if platform.system() == 'Windows': import ctypes def is_link(path): path_buf = ctypes.create_unicode_buffer(path) return ctypes.windll.kernel32.GetFileAttributesW(path_buf) & FILE_ATTRIBUTE_REPARSE_POINT == FILE_ATTRIBUTE_REPARSE_POINT else: import os is_link = os.path.islink ``` It should be straightforward to incorporate this into mozfile.