Handling File Read Errors with Node.js fs.promises.readFile
I've been struggling with this for a few days now and could really use some help... Can someone help me understand I'm working on a personal project and I'm working with Node.js version 14 and trying to read a text file using the built-in `fs.promises` module... I want to implement proper error handling, but I've encountered unexpected behavior when the file doesn't exist. Here's the code snippet I have so far: ```javascript const fs = require('fs').promises; async function readFileContent(filePath) { try { const data = await fs.readFile(filePath, 'utf8'); console.log(data); } catch (error) { console.error('Error reading file:', error); } } readFileContent('nonexistent.txt'); ``` When I run this code with a file path that doesn't exist, I see the following error message: ``` Error reading file: [Error: ENOENT: no such file or directory, open 'nonexistent.txt'] ``` This is expected, but I want to handle the error more gracefully by checking if the file exists before attempting to read it. I tried using `fs.access`, but I run into a race condition because the file could be created by another process after the check but before the read operation. Here's what I tried: ```javascript async function readFileSafely(filePath) { try { await fs.access(filePath); const data = await fs.readFile(filePath, 'utf8'); console.log(data); } catch (error) { if (error.code === 'ENOENT') { console.error('File does not exist. Please check the path.'); } else { console.error('Error reading file:', error); } } } readFileSafely('nonexistent.txt'); ``` However, this still gives me the same `ENOENT` error if the file does not exist, which I want to avoid during the read operation. Is there a better approach to handle this scenario without running into race conditions? What best practices can I leverage in this situation? My development environment is macOS. This is happening in both development and production on Ubuntu 22.04. Any advice would be much appreciated. What am I doing wrong?