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Re: coreutils 5.97: Adjust mkdir message (File exists)
From: |
Jari Aalto |
Subject: |
Re: coreutils 5.97: Adjust mkdir message (File exists) |
Date: |
Wed, 09 Jan 2008 09:55:55 +0200 |
User-agent: |
Gnus/5.110007 (No Gnus v0.7) Emacs/22.1 (windows-nt) |
* Tue 2008-01-08 Jim Meyering <address@hidden>
* Message-Id: address@hidden
> Jari Aalto <address@hidden> wrote:
>
>> A demonstration:
>>
>> mkdir cache/temp
>> mkdir cache/temp
>> mkdir: cannot create directory `cache/tmp': File exists
>
> I presume it wasn't "mkdir" that changed "temp" to "tmp"
>
>> Suggestion:
>>
>> Perhaps the "File" is not the best description in this case.
>> Please consider saying "Directory exists" if the item is directory.
>
> Thanks, but "File exists" is just the English version of the
> strerror(EEXIST) string from the C library.
"Target exists" would be more generic if message is based on the EEXIST
error code.
> For one thing, in discussing file system objects, "file" is often
> used to refer to a generic object, be it symlink, block device,
> regular file, directory, etc. But that's not the real issue.
>
> Also, what about when the preexisting thing is a regular file:
>
> touch f && mkdir f
>
> or a symlink:
>
> ln -s . f && mkdir f
>
> Should mkdir have to perform an additional lstat so that
> it can include the type of the preexisting file system "object"
> when the mkdir functions fails with EEXIST?
I'd welcome this. When error condition occures, it's a perfect place to
provide more information. The information is not necessarily displayed
to user, but stored to a log file, so when person looks at the logs
later, he can get detailled view of the problem.
I'd estimate that 90% of the cases the messages differentiating:
- File
- Directory
- Symlink
- "Other"
Would suffice in the error messages.
> I'm inclined to say no, but there is precedent for examining the file
> type. The prompt you see when using rm's -i tells you about the type
> of the file it might remove.
Jari
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