cwd evaluated before onlyif in exec - puppet 5.5.12 - puppet

Question

In Puppet 5.5.0 this worked fine, but in Puppet 5.5.12 it does no longer work:
exec { 'example' :
command => "date",
cwd => "/fu",
onlyif => "ls /fu",
path => ['/usr/bin', '/usr/sbin', '/bin', ],
}
Error message:
Could not evaluate: Working directory /fu does not exist!
So somehow cwd is now getting evaluated before the onlyif making the latter futile. Any idea where this comes from in this minor release from 5.5.0 to 5.5.12?
Is there a bug or intended behavior? I could not find anything so far.
Any input is appreciated :)

Answer 1

So somehow cwd is now getting evaluated before the onlyif making the
latter futile. Any idea where this comes from in this minor release
from 5.5.0 to 5.5.12?
This is Puppet issue PUP-9194, which they claim to be a fix for a regression. It was reported against Puppet 6, and it is documented in the release notes for Puppet 6.0.2. The comment thread on the ticket reports that the fix was also applied to the Puppet 5 codebase. No release note seems to have been added in the Puppet 5 series, but the timing is right for Puppet 5.5.7.
Is there a bug or intended behavior? I could not
find anything so far.
Evidently the behavior change was intentional; it is the old behavior that was considered buggy. I note here that that conclusion seems to be based on historic practice, not documentation (so the behavior you relied upon differed from even older behavior). The docs for onlyif specify several Exec attributes that apply both to the main command and to onlyif commands, and cwd is not among them.

Answer 2

This is intended behaviour I'm afraid. From https://puppet.com/docs/puppet/5.5/types/exec.html#exec-attribute-cwd:
cwd
The directory from which to run the command. If this directory does not exist, the command will fail.
Could you recode as something like this?
exec { 'example' :
command => "cd /fu && date",
onlyif => "[ -d /fu ]",
path => ['/usr/bin', '/usr/sbin', '/bin', ],
}