tag 9823 moreinfo
thanks
On 10/21/2011 06:46 AM, francky.l...@telenet.be wrote:
Hello,
if one uses mv to move a directory, and the target dir already
exists, mv reports "Directory not empty".
Can you please show a shell session that sets up the necessary paths and
the actual command you typed that resulted in this message? A shell
transcript will make it possible for us to repeat your actions and
analyze them, much more so than a vague paraphrased English description.
For example, I tried this, and it didn't give an error:
$ rm -rf ?
$ mkdir a b
$ touch b/c
$ mv a b
but it did move a to become b/a. Meanwhile, I can use a GNU extension
to reproduce your error message:
$ rm -rf ?
$ mkdir a b
$ touch b/c
$ mv -T a b
mv: cannot move `a' to `b': Directory not empty
But to me, this gives me an expected error - directory b is not empty,
therefore the syscall rename("a","b") is required to fail by POSIX, and
POSIX states that the failure will be either EEXIST or ENOTEMPTY (Linux
chose ENOTEMPTY) - so mv is faithfully reporting the strerror() value of
the actual error encountered. It's not possible to change the
strerror() database, and printing a message not in the strerror()
database can be confusing to developers that have come to expect
specific output for specific errno values.
I find this misleading. The message should also contain the
message "target dir already exists" or something similar.
So it sounds like you'd prefer it if the message were for EEXIST instead
of ENOTEMPTY? Have you tried to take it up with the Linux kernel folks?
Or maybe coreutils could add a special case that if rename() fails
with ENOTEMPTY and the conditions are right, then convert the errno to
EEXIST before calling strerror(). But is it worth the minor
pessimization (we do have precedence for some errno massaging, but it
tends to need good justification)? mv -T is seldom called in the first
place, since it is not POSIX.
Or did you encounter a scenario with this error message without using
GNU extensions?
--
Eric Blake ebl...@redhat.com +1-801-349-2682
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org
