Re: "mv a b/" when b does not exist

[Tim Waugh]

On Tue, Nov 29, 2005 at 05:24:32PM +0100, Jim Meyering wrote:

> Note that the underlying rename would fail on Linux 2.6.x and *BSD
> (but it'd succeed on Solaris 9 and 10):

No, you're looking at a different case:

>   $ touch a; rm -rf b; perl -e 'rename "a", "b/" or die "$!"'
>   Not a directory at -e line 1.
>   [Exit 20]

Certainly if "a" is a regular file I wouldn't expect this to work, and
in fact it does not work on Linux with coreutils-5.2.1 either.

The particular case I wanted to raise awareness of is when "a" is a
directory.  In this instance, the underlying rename call works without
any problem:

$ mkdir a; rm -rf b; perl -e 'rename "a", "b/" or die "$!"'
$ file a b
a: ERROR: cannot open `a' (No such file or directory)
b: directory

..but the equivalent mv command does not in 5.93, whereas it did in
5.2.1:

$ mkdir a; rm -rf b; mv a b/
$ mv --version
mv (coreutils) 5.2.1

$ mkdir a; rm -rf b; mv a b/
mv: target `b/' is not a directory: No such file or directory
$ mv --version
mv (GNU coreutils) 5.93

> If you can convince the kernel folks to change the way rename works,
> or POSIX to dissociate mv behavior from that of rename(2), then you
> might have a case for changing GNU mv.

The kernel rename syscall is working fine, and does not fail.

Tim.
*/

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