RE: mv doesn't respect --reply=no

[Halas, Miroslav]

Hello Eric,

Thank you very much for your reply and recommendation. I have replaced
gnuwin32 with cygwin and mv.exe with rsync.exe and everything now works
as expected.

Thanks again,

Miro 


 

-----Original Message-----
From: Eric Blake [mailto:address@hidden 
Sent: Tuesday, October 20, 2009 7:56 PM
To: Halas, Miroslav
Cc: address@hidden
Subject: Re: mv doesn't respect --reply=no

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According to Halas, Miroslav on 10/20/2009 3:54 PM:
> This bus was encountered as part of mv.exe from coreutils 5.3.0 from 
> gnuwin project

Severely old.  The latest version is 8.0.  I'd recommend upgrading to
something a little more maintained, such as the cygwin port of
coreutils.

> mv --v --reply=no a.txt Z:\
> 
> always overwrites Z:\a.txt if present.

Not a bug, but admittedly confusing.

> My understanding is that
> --reply=no
> should mean answer no to question about overwriting the file. 

No, --reply=no means to answer no IF THE QUESTION WOULD HAVE BEEN ASKED.
But since POSIX requires mv to overwrite writable files without asking,
depending on the situation (and your situation was one of them), there
was no question ever asked for --reply=no to respond to.

http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/faq/coreutils-faq.html#cp-and-mv-t
he-reply-option-is-deprecated

And your confusion in this matter is why newer versions of mv have
altogether removed --reply.

- --
Don't work too hard, make some time for fun as well!

Eric Blake             address@hidden
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