Empty a repo clone when Windows will not delete its root

[nedonatelli]

Third attempt at the SWE-harness clone leak, and the first grounded in a measurement rather than a theory.

What the evidence shows

Instrumenting the failure path over two 2-task runs:

could not remove clone ...swe-repo-django_django-EDY54e: EPERM
  remains: 28 entr(ies): .editorconfig, .eslintignore, .eslintrc, .git, ...
  probe: removing inner '.editorconfig' SUCCEEDED (file level is free)
  probe: rmdir on the clone root FAILED: EBUSY: resource busy or locked

Two facts settle it:

1. The tree is intact — 28 entries, .git included. fs.rmSync(recursive) aborts on its first operation and cleans nothing, rather than clearing the tree and failing on a final rmdir. I had previously assumed the latter, and that wrong assumption is what made "a directory handle is held" look like a complete explanation.
2. The root is EBUSY while its contents delete on demand — so the lock is on the directory, not the files.

No child process survives, and the root frees the instant the test process exits, which puts the handle inside the test process.

What this does not do

It does not identify what holds the handle. I stopped looking deliberately. The two previous fixes were root-cause guesses and both changed nothing:

• bc429f3 — raised the retry budget 1s → 4.5s, on the theory that cleanup raced ShellSession.dispose()'s 3s force-kill
• 97fe8ab — killed the whole process tree, on the theory that a surviving grandchild held it

A third guess is worth less than working with the behaviour actually measured.

What it does

If the root will not go, take everything inside it. Verified end-to-end: the leftover directory now has 0 entries instead of 28, turning a ~35MB-per-repo-per-run leak into a directory entry that sweepStaleClones() collects on a later run.

For scale: 167 clones and several GB had accumulated over two days of measurement runs before anyone looked at the temp folder.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

[github-actions]

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