Jim Meyering wrote:
> Right. My motivation for adding this `feature' was to prevent
> `mv a/* b/* dir' from destroying (silently!) user data. By the
> same token, a successful invocation of `cp a/* b/* dir' might well
> be followed by rm -rf a b.
I know this is one of the features that you really like. So I have
not said anything previously. But I would have to file this as being
one of the most annoying features to have been added in recent years.
I often have cases where I have duplicate files here and there in a
directory tree. For various reasons I want to move them to the
archive. If they are named the same they have the same contents so I
only want to keep exactly one copy of them. So I want
mv */*/foo ../ARCHIVE/
mv $(find . -name foo -print)../ARCHIVE/
to move those files to the target directory. But of course with the
duplicate check in place that fails. So then I started using a for
loop so that it would be different mv commands.
for f in */*/foo; do mv $f ../ARCHIVE/
That works but is a lot of typing. If the -f option forced the move
then I would be happy with that. The documentation explicitly says it
will overwrite files.
-f, --force
do not prompt before overwriting (equivalent to --reply=yes)
mv -f */*/foo ../ARCHIVE/ # does not force
But of course that does not turn this behavior off. So actually I use
the for loop most of the time. Finger memory and all of that.
> It's be nice to fix POSIX.
I would rather see the previous behavior restored.
> Here's the NEWS item from fileutils-4.1.1 (November 3, 2001):
>
> * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
> the source files in the following example:
> rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
(Don't read too much sarcasm into this next statement.)
I am hoping there are no plans to make this fail.
touch foo bar
mv foo bar
Because currently that also silently clobbers files. But that is just
the way I like it!
Bob
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