obscure mv behavior?

Jerry Feldman gaf at blu.org
Sun Jul 17 09:25:46 EDT 2005


On Fri, 15 Jul 2005 11:51:29 -0400 (EDT)
"Ken Gosier" <ken at kg293.net> wrote:

> Hi, I'm getting a little funny behavior out of mv. Most times when I want
> to move a directory, I can just do:
> 
> mv srcDir trgDir
> 
> and everything's fine. (That is, srcDir will no longer be there, and now I
> will have a directory trgDir/srcDir.) Sometimes, however, I get the error
> message:
> 
> mv: srcDir is a directory
> 
> I haven't been able to figure out the special circumstances under which I
> get this message. (It happens randomly, as far as I can tell.) btw, I'm
> running on Solaris 2.6. Also, if I explicitly say:
> 
> mv srcDir trgDir/srcDir
> 
> then it works correctly. Does anyone know what's going on here?
Case 1:
trgDir/srcDir does not exist
	mv srcDir trgDir # should work
case 2:
trgDir/srcDir exists
	mv srcDir trgDir # should fail

This is the only thing I can think of that would prevent mv from
working here. 

I don't have a Solaris box available to me at home, so I can't try to
reproduce it.


-- 
Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
Boston Linux and Unix user group
http://www.blu.org PGP key id:C5061EA9
PGP Key fingerprint:053C 73EC 3AC1 5C44 3E14 9245 FB00 3ED5 C506 1EA9
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.blu.org/pipermail/discuss/attachments/20050717/9145a612/attachment.sig>


More information about the Discuss mailing list