Date: Tue, 21 Nov 1995 14:10:09 +1100 From: Bruce Evans <bde@zeta.org.au> To: freebsd-bugs@FreeBSD.ORG, tege@matematik.su.se Subject: Re: Bogus mv behaviour Message-ID: <199511210310.OAA26445@godzilla.zeta.org.au>
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>When moving directories across filesystems, e.g., "mv SOURCEDIR/A DESTDIR", >if DESTDIR/A exists, SOURCEDIR/A will be made into DESTDIR/A/A. That's very >surprising, in particular when many directories are moved in the same >command, and they end up at different levels. This bug affects all mv's, not just ones across file systems. I hope it only affects the top level, so you can recover fairly easily. This behaviour is almost documented for mv's across file systems :-). The effect is supposed to be equivalent to rm -f DESTDIR && \ cp -pRP SOURCEDIR/A DESTDIR && \ rm -rf SOURCEDIR cp will change DESTDIR to DESTDIR/A and do the wrong thing if DESTDIR/A already exists. However, the rm -f can't work for directories and apparently isn't done. mv across file systems is so fundamentally broken that I think it shouldn't be available. cp -pRP has several bugs (it snaps links and doesn't preserve all possible file times) and there is no way the mv can be atomic. Brucehome | help
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