Re: question about the "copy, then remove" behaviour of mv

[Musaul Karim]

Hi Bob, my coreutils version is 6.10 as well. This is in xubuntu 9.04.

When I run ...

  $ mv -v 1 /var/tmp/

... on a two level deep directory structure with files file1 to 5
gives me the following output, which seems consistent with what
happened earlier.

`1' -> `/var/tmp/1'
`1/src' -> `/var/tmp/1/src'
`1/src/file3' -> `/var/tmp/1/src/file3'
`1/src/file1' -> `/var/tmp/1/src/file1'
`1/src/file5' -> `/var/tmp/1/src/file5'
`1/src/file4' -> `/var/tmp/1/src/file4'
`1/src/file2' -> `/var/tmp/1/src/file2'
removed `1/src/file3'
removed `1/src/file1'
removed `1/src/file5'
removed `1/src/file4'
removed `1/src/file2'
removed directory: `1/src'
removed directory: `1'


I'll try out strace later to see if it is in fact waiting for all
files to be copied before removing them.


Thanks Henrik. I'll try the 'find' way the next time I need to copy
large numbers of files.