But that is not what I get on my linux system.

[EMAIL PROTECTED] test]$ mkdir -p foo/foo
[EMAIL PROTECTED] test]$ cd foo/
[EMAIL PROTECTED] foo]$ mv foo ..
mv: cannot overwrite directory `../foo'
[EMAIL PROTECTED] foo]$


On 7/19/07, Rob Sherwood <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On Thu, Jul 19, 2007 at 02:37:17PM -0400, Russ wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I'm fairly new to Linux. Could someone expound on this?  Coincidentally, I
> was just looking at the Man page for mv earlier today.  Are you trying to
> move a directory?  I'm not sure what your intention was with the command
> "mv foo ..".  Just looking for a better understanding of Linux.

You're right, I was just trying to move a directory to it's parent
directory.  But, there was a directory with the same name in the parent
directory, so the shell attempted to delete/replace the second "foo"
with the first, but you can't delete non-empty directories.  So, where
as I might have hoped for an error to the effect of "move failed,
destionation directory already exists", what I got was "Directory not
empty" which was really confusing.   It was even more confusing because
the directory names were not both "foo", but long dates that I did not
expect to be the same "traces_07_17_2007-12PM".

> thanks,

No problem at all...

- Rob
.

Reply via email to