-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 According to Frederik Eaton on 8/22/2006 8:12 AM: > Dear bug-coreutils, > > We are trying to decide what the semantics of the Haskell standard > library function 'copyFile' should be. The first incarnation behaved > roughly like 'cp', i.e. overwriting destination files without > unlinking them first. This isn't suitable for installing stuff, for > example, since if an executable is running and we try to overwrite it > then there is a "Text file busy" error. We could change the semantics > to be the same as 'cp --remove-destination', i.e. unlinking > pre-existing destination files.
cp follows POSIX semantics unless you add the flag --remove-destination. > > The question is, is there a reason why users wouldn't always want a > "copyFile" function to remove the destination first? If there is, then > maybe we should have two separate functions, for both situations. The > only drawback I can think of for removing the destination first, is a > race condition when someone else is trying to create the same file, > but how often does that actually become a problem? One reason is permissions. Editing an existing file preserves the owner, group, and inode; whereas unlinking and creating a new file does not. - -- Life is short - so eat dessert first! Eric Blake [EMAIL PROTECTED] -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.2.1 (Cygwin) Comment: Public key at home.comcast.net/~ericblake/eblake.gpg Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFE6xZX84KuGfSFAYARAsIvAKCVEHZa/klU3GKR5gcXA0BRO+GFHQCfV6hJ qI4+d9FEO6yj2HYWUK4bROE= =+aWu -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ Bug-coreutils mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-coreutils
