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Re: mv silently does nothing for hard links
From: |
eavis |
Subject: |
Re: mv silently does nothing for hard links |
Date: |
Wed, 2 Apr 2003 18:49:31 +0100 |
>>mv(1) behaves oddly with hard links.
>Thank you for reporting that. FYI, the same thing would happen with mv
>from the latest test release:
>
> ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-4.5.12.tar.bz2 (coreutils
> is the union of fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils)
I was going to try that but I couldn't get it to compile on my system and
I haven't yet gotten round to investigating. (I think the standard
headers on my system (HP-UX 11 with gcc 3.0.1) are a bit broken.)
>But the actual behavior is system-dependent, since it relies on the
>underlying `rename' system call.
>FYI, the POSIX spec for rename says this:
>
> If the old argument and the new argument resolve to the same existing
> file, rename( ) shall return successfully and perform no other action.
But I don't see why mv should be a thin wrapper around rename(). It
already does some extra things like moving files between filesystems, so
couldn't mv detect the case of 'different filenames, same file' and do
something a bit more sensible?
--
Ed Avis <address@hidden>