Re: mv --no-preserve-ownership

[Pádraig Brady]

On 30/04/15 13:02, sa wrote:
> Dear coreutils developers,
> 
> 
> it's still common today when you can copy files somewhere but subsequent 
> chown() on them returns EACCES:
> 
> NFS without strict uid/gid mapping,
> CIFS with broken Unix Extensions - nowaday NAS devices,
> less common filesystems like sshfs.
> 
> When you move files to there, intuitively the operation is plain move, 
> but mv should be avoided because of error messages (as many as file number):
> 
> mv: failed to preserve ownership
> 
> Sometimes these error messages probably hide really important error 
> messages and hence force me to double-check: if files were actually 
> copied to destination and were actually deleted from source.
> During years, I'm inventing, improving and distributing lines like "cp 
> &&rm", having developed fear for using mv.
> 
> What do coreutils developers think about this?
> Is there hope for accepting --no-preserve-ownership patch to mv?

Maybe, but the `cp ... && rm` combo give more control
and isn't too awkward for this.  Also it doesn't have
a functional disadvantage of using extra space, as
generally this is an issue between separate file systems.
Also it has a functional advantage of being an atomic
operation, not deleting any files unless all were copied.

thanks,
Pádraig.