discardUnlessAccepted unlinks from a res.on('close') handler, so nothing awaits it and nothing can. `await request()` resolves when the response completes, which is when close fires — so a read taken straight afterwards races the unlink it is meant to observe. The property is an eventual one and the assertions were synchronous.
The issue counted three tests. Injecting a 400ms delay into the unlink to make the race deterministic showed five: "leaves nothing on the volume when it refuses the content" and "discards the valid files from a request that also carried an invalid one" race too, and are not in the describe block the issue named.
It also showed that polling alone is not enough. The race runs in both directions, and the second direction is easy to miss: a deletion still pending from the *previous* test corrupts the next test's baseline before its request is even sent. No amount of waiting fixes a baseline that is already wrong. My first attempt waited for the directory to look quiet, which only works while the unlink is faster than the wait — precisely the assumption this issue is about, and it still failed four tests under the injected delay.
So the baseline is removed as a variable: beforeEach empties the directory, every test starts from empty, and the assertions poll for the expected count. Any orphan from an earlier suite goes with it, which is correct — the directory is temporary and nothing outside these tests owns it. discardUploads already catches per-file errors, so a pending unlink finding its file gone logs and moves on.
Verified by injecting the 400ms delay again: four to five failures before, twelve passing after, with the production file restored untouched.
Closes #228
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>