Re: mv silently does nothing for hard links

[eavis]

>>mv(1) behaves oddly with hard links.

>Thank you for reporting that. FYI, the same thing would happen with mv
>from the latest test release:
>
>  ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-4.5.12.tar.bz2 (coreutils
>  is the union of fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils)

I was going to try that but I couldn't get it to compile on my system and 
I haven't yet gotten round to investigating.  (I think the standard 
headers on my system (HP-UX 11 with gcc 3.0.1) are a bit broken.)

>But the actual behavior is system-dependent, since it relies on the
>underlying `rename' system call.

>FYI, the POSIX spec for rename says this:
>
>  If the old argument and the new argument resolve to the same existing
>  file, rename( ) shall return successfully and perform no other action.

But I don't see why mv should be a thin wrapper around rename().  It 
already does some extra things like moving files between filesystems, so 
couldn't mv detect the case of 'different filenames, same file' and do 
something a bit more sensible?

-- 
Ed Avis <address@hidden>