anthropics/skills · error · RefusedToClean

no relationship in this package names a part we can resolve.

Error message

no relationship in this package names a part we can resolve. Refusing to treat every file as unreferenced.

What it means

clean_unused_files() guards against catastrophic deletion: if the package contains .rels files but get_referenced_files() resolves none of them to actual parts, every file would look 'unreferenced' and a naive cleaner would delete the whole package. It raises RefusedToClean instead, treating total resolution failure as a parse/corruption problem rather than an unreferenced-file problem.

Source

Thrown at skills/pptx/scripts/clean.py:257

    changed = False

    for override in list(dom.getElementsByTagName("Override")):
        part_name = override.getAttribute("PartName").lstrip("/")
        if part_name in removed_files:
            if override.parentNode:
                override.parentNode.removeChild(override)
                changed = True

    if changed:
        with open(ct_path, "wb") as f:
            f.write(dom.toxml(encoding="utf-8"))


def clean_unused_files(unpacked_dir: Path) -> list[str]:
    all_removed = []

    if list(unpacked_dir.rglob("*.rels")) and not get_referenced_files(unpacked_dir):
        raise RefusedToClean(
            "no relationship in this package names a part we can resolve. "
            "Refusing to treat every file as unreferenced."
        )

    slides_removed = remove_orphaned_slides(unpacked_dir)
    all_removed.extend(slides_removed)

    trash_removed = remove_trash_directory(unpacked_dir)
    all_removed.extend(trash_removed)

    while True:
        removed_rels = remove_orphaned_rels_files(unpacked_dir)
        referenced = get_referenced_files(unpacked_dir)
        removed_files = remove_orphaned_files(unpacked_dir, referenced)

        total_removed = removed_rels + removed_files
        if not total_removed:
            break

View on GitHub (pinned to f6656c1256)

Solutions

Re-save the deck with PowerPoint or LibreOffice ('soffice --headless --convert-to pptx') to rebuild conformant relationships, then retry.
Inspect the .rels files for backslash targets or traversal targets (fix per errors 14/15/16) and repair them.
Re-unpack the original pptx completely and confirm no parts are missing on disk.
Run a package validator to find which relationships fail to resolve.

Example fix

# before
clean_unused_files(unpacked_dir)  # RefusedToClean: nothing resolvable

# after
import subprocess, zipfile, tempfile
with tempfile.TemporaryDirectory() as td:
    subprocess.run(["soffice", "--headless", "--convert-to", "pptx", "--outdir", td, str(src)], check=True)
    with zipfile.ZipFile(next(Path(td).glob("*.pptx"))) as zf:
        zf.extractall(unpacked_dir_unpacked)
clean_unused_files(unpacked_dir_unpacked)

Defensive patterns

Strategy: try-catch

Validate before calling

import zipfile

def package_has_resolvable_rels(path: str) -> bool:
    # cheap smoke check: every internal rel target should at least exist as a part
    import re, posixpath
    with zipfile.ZipFile(path) as zf:
        names = set(zf.namelist())
        for name in [n for n in names if n.endswith(".rels")]:
            base = posixpath.dirname(posixpath.dirname(name))
            for m in re.finditer(rb'Target="([^"]+)"[^>]*?(TargetMode="External")?', zf.read(name)):
                t = m.group(1).decode()
                if m.group(2) or "://" in t or t.startswith("/"):
                    continue
                if posixpath.normpath(posixpath.join(base, t)) not in names:
                    return False
    return True

Try / catch

try:
    removed = clean_unused_files(unpacked_dir)
except RefusedToClean as e:
    log.warning("package %s not cleaned (unresolvable relationships): %s", src, e)
    # keep original untouched; re-save via LibreOffice and retry once, else skip

Prevention

Treat RefusedToClean as a stop signal — never work around it by forcing deletion.
Normalize decks through a conformant re-save before cleaning pipelines.
Validate that .rels targets resolve to existing parts before cleanup jobs.
Operate on copies; preserve originals for destructive operations.

When it happens

Trigger: Cleaning a pptx where all relationship targets fail resolution — e.g. every target contains backslashes or escapes the package (triggering opc_target failures that are swallowed per-entry), targets point at parts that do not exist on disk, or the unpacked tree is missing files that the rels reference.

Common situations: Corrupt or non-conformant decks from converters (Windows-style rels targets); partially extracted archives where some parts failed to unpack; hand-modified packages; the same root causes as errors 14-16 surfacing at the clean orchestration layer.

Related errors

AI-assisted analysis of anthropics/skills@f6656c1256 (2026-08-14). Data as JSON: /api/errors/4410d60e32927a5a. Report an issue: GitHub.