mv seems to think that ../dir is a subdirectory of dir, not realising that .. has a special meaning.
Here's a shell transcript that produces the incorrect error message in coreutils 5.97-5.2ubuntu3 (ubuntu 7.04): $ cd $ mkdir test $ cd test $ mkdir ../dir $ mkdir dir $ touch ../dir/x dir/y $ ls -al ../dir dir dir: total 20 drwxr-xr-x 2 chris chris 4096 2007-08-14 18:37 . drwxr-xr-x 3 chris chris 4096 2007-08-14 18:36 .. -rw-r--r-- 1 chris chris 0 2007-08-14 18:37 y ../dir: total 28 drwxr-xr-x 2 chris chris 4096 2007-08-14 18:37 . drwx------ 104 chris chris 12288 2007-08-14 18:36 .. -rw-r--r-- 1 chris chris 0 2007-08-14 18:37 x $ mv dir .. mv: cannot move `dir' to a subdirectory of itself, `../dir' $ rm ../dir/x $ ls -al ../dir dir dir: total 20 drwxr-xr-x 2 chris chris 4096 2007-08-14 18:37 . drwxr-xr-x 3 chris chris 4096 2007-08-14 18:36 .. -rw-r--r-- 1 chris chris 0 2007-08-14 18:37 y ../dir: total 24 drwxr-xr-x 2 chris chris 4096 2007-08-14 18:38 . drwx------ 104 chris chris 12288 2007-08-14 18:36 .. $ mv dir .. $ ls -al ../dir dir ls: dir: No such file or directory ../dir: total 28 drwxr-xr-x 2 chris chris 4096 2007-08-14 18:37 . drwx------ 104 chris chris 12288 2007-08-14 18:36 .. -rw-r--r-- 1 chris chris 0 2007-08-14 18:37 y $ Perhaps it's correct behaviour not to allow me to move ./dir into the parent directory when the parent directory contains a non-empty directory with the same name, but the error message that is shown is misleading - ../dir isn't a subdirectory of ./dir _______________________________________________ Bug-coreutils mailing list Bug-coreutils@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-coreutils