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Date:      Sun, 11 Feb 2001 21:20:01 -0800 (PST)
From:      Bruce Evans <bde@zeta.org.au>
To:        freebsd-bugs@FreeBSD.org
Subject:   Re: bin/25013: mv(1) cannot move unresolvable symlinks across devices
Message-ID:  <200102120520.f1C5K1d05869@freefall.freebsd.org>

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The following reply was made to PR bin/25013; it has been noted by GNATS.

From: Bruce Evans <bde@zeta.org.au>
To: mkamm@gmx.net
Cc: FreeBSD-gnats-submit@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: Re: bin/25013: mv(1) cannot move unresolvable symlinks across devices
Date: Mon, 12 Feb 2001 16:18:49 +1100 (EST)

 On Sun, 11 Feb 2001 mkamm@gmx.net wrote:
 
 > Unresolvable symlinks cannot be moved across devices with mv(1).
 > ...
 > >Fix:
 > 
 > The problem was introduced with a code snippet that protects against
 > moving mountpoints. Moving mountpoints is bad, because that would
 > trigger "cp -pRP /mountpoint newname".  My patch invokes this code
 > snippet only if a directory is to be moved and bypasses it otherwise.
 > (My patch also tries to avoid redundant lstat(2) calls.)
 
 I think the "protection" should just be removed.  POSIX.2 doesn't
 mention a special case for mountpoints (at least least in my old draft
 copy that doesn't specify mountpoints :-).  Moving a huge directory
 may be a mistake whether or not the directory is a mountpoint.  It is
 practically impossible to "protect" against moving mountpoints deep
 in the hierarchy.
 
 I think that POSIX.2 and/or BSD made a mistake here, and mv should never
 move across filesystems without being forced to.  gnu mv still refuses
 to move across filesystems in the last version that I have handy (a
 Feb 26 1997 Redhat version running under FreeBSD; this also has emulation
 problems -- "mv /tmp/q /usr" attempted to move the directory to
 /compat/linux/usr/q).
 
 Bruce
 
 


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