Peformance problem with mv

[John Summerfield]

I have GNU fileutils 4.0p installed on Red Hat Linux 6.2.

I have some files about 420 Mbytes in size, and I tried to move them from one 
directory to another on the same device.

The command I used was
   mv uml/* fs/

What I expected to happen is logically equivalent to
ln uml/FILE fs/FILE
rm uml/FILE

for each file.

What mv actually attempted was to copy the files with the result it took ages 
and then ran out of space.

I eventually got round the problem by shuffling directory names and that 
worked well.

I'm baffled as to why it attempted what it did, but there is no room for 
doubt: I ran out of disk space.


-- 
Cheers
John Summerfield
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