Thanks.
Seems clear. Always use this flag and you get "expected", "old", behavior.
I was going to suggest that there be a description of the symbolic link
dereferencing in the descriptive body of the info page. But the entire
page is so short that the description of this new argument takes up a
significant fraction of it anyhow. None the less, I've been writing so
here's my stab at it:
SOURCE arguments that are symbolic links to directories are a special case:
when such a SOURCE argument has a trailing slash, the directory
_referenced_ by the symbolic link is renamed; when the SOURCE does not have
a trailing slash, the symbolic link itself is renamed. <move from
--strip-trailing-slashes doc>Although this behavior may seem surprising, it
is required by POSIX.2 and is consistent with other parts of that
standard.</move> --strip-trailing-slashes disables this special case --
when this argument is used symbolic links will never be dereferenced, mv
will always rename the symbolic link.
(Feel free to change : and ; to . in the first sentence above.)
It also occurs to me that perhaps mv should impliment a (gnu standard)
--dereference argument to always dereference, and maybe a --no-dereference
to never dereference. --no-dereference would be instead of
--strip-trailing-slashes. (The end user dosen't really care how the
system's rename() function works and how mv has to fudge it.)
>[This is a resend (I had a bad route for artic)...]
>
>"Karl O. Pinc" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
>...
>| > Consistent and standard
>| >behavior is better than random better behavior that is all different
>| >everywhere.
>|
>| Ok. I accept this. Can't say it makes me happy. :-P
>|
>| There should be a note in the documentation tho'.
>
>In the latest test release,
>
> ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/fetish/fileutils-4.0o.tar.gz
>
>there is this:
>
>`--strip-trailing-slashes'
> Remove any trailing slashes from each SOURCE argument. This is
> useful when a SOURCE argument may have a trailing slash and specify
> a symbolic link to a directory. This scenario is in fact rather
> common because some shells can automatically append a trailing
> slash when performing file name completion on such symbolic links.
> Without this option, `mv' (via the system's rename function) must
> interpret the trailing slash as a request to dereference the
> symbolic link and so must rename the indirectly referenced
> _directory_ and not the symbolic link. Although this behavior may
> seem surprising, it is required by POSIX.2 and is consistent with
> other parts of that standard.
Karl
May the Legos (TM) always be swept from your path in the night.
