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bug#23263: cat: missingfile: No such file or directory


From: Paul Eggert
Subject: bug#23263: cat: missingfile: No such file or directory
Date: Sun, 10 Apr 2016 12:01:09 -0700
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:38.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/38.6.0

Jonny Grant wrote:
Hello

I noticed that cat doesn't have an accurate message in the following use-case:

$ cat missingfile
cat: missingfile: No such file or directory
$ mkdir testdir
$ cat testdir
cat: testdir: Is a directory

The "No such file or directory" message occurs because the operating system does not have a separate error code for missing directory versus missing file. In the example you gave, perhaps the working directory is missing (this can happen on some systems), or perhaps there is no file named "missingfile" in the working directory; the same code is returned for both situations.

This is not a coreutils issue, but is instead a kernel and C library issue. It's not something that coreutils can "fix", even assuming it was agreed that it was a bug. If it really bothers you, I suggest writing the POSIX standardization committee, but I should warn you that you'll need a strong argument to change something that has been standardized for decades.





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