Thanks for reporting the bug. I installed the attached patch to fix it.
>From af4711d5dc15f0c014bfd9c92f4eadedb89f732f Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Paul Eggert
Date: Sun, 15 Aug 2021 21:29:38 -0700
Subject: [PATCH] chmod: fix use of uninitialized var if -v
Problem reported by Michael Debertol
Hi,
I noticed that when running chmod with -v on a dangling symlink the
error message is somewhat random:
> ln -s file-that-does-not-exist lnk
> chmod -w lnk -v
> chmod: cannot operate on dangling symlink 'lnk'
> failed to change mode of 'lnk' from (-) to (rwsrwsrwt)
>
