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bug#19051: rm symboliclink/ # "Is a directory"
From: |
Pádraig Brady |
Subject: |
bug#19051: rm symboliclink/ # "Is a directory" |
Date: |
Fri, 14 Nov 2014 11:41:57 +0000 |
User-agent: |
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:31.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/31.2.0 |
tag 19051 notabug
close 19501
stop
On 14/11/14 06:53, aaron brick wrote:
> hi folks,
>
> $ ln -s / sl
> $ rm sl/
> rm: cannot remove `sl/': Is a directory
> $ rm sl
> $
>
> the presence of the slash is not such a great way to test for whether
> or not a file is a directory. you may find the above example
> contrived, but it occurs easily because bash's default tab completion
> for symlinks to directories adds the trailing slash. this confused the
> hell out of one of my students.
>
> thanks for your hard work!
> aaron brick.
Confused me too when I encountered it first, but tt's required by POSIX:
http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/basedefs/xbd_chap04.html#tag_04_11
But now I see that coreutils rmdir is inconsistent and doesn't
treat sl/ as the directory. We should probably fix that up
to be consistent with other tools, POSIX and other systems.
thanks,
Pádraig.