Re: mv bug

[Philip Rowlands]

On Wed, 7 Dec 2005, Vincent Chan wrote:

> I have a bunched of files in a directory and there are a.avi and a.rar 
> in it. Inside the directory, there is also a directory called "a". I 
> wanted to type "mv a.* a". But instead I typed "mv a.*" by mistake. As 
> a result, I can't find the original a.rar anymore, but I found that it 
> renamed a.avi to a.rar. Why?

This behaviour is caused not by mv itself, but the actions of the shell 
expanding the "a.*" argument. Permit me to explain by example:

$ echo a.*
a.avi a.rar
$ mv --verbose a.*
`a.avi' -> `a.rar'

The shell passes the two separate filenames to mv, which interprets the 
arguments as a request to overwrite. To avoid this, you could create a 
shell alias such as:
alias mv='mv -i'

which will prompt the user in situations like this.


Cheers,
Phil