From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Lucio De Re To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Subject: Re: [9fans] mv vs cp Message-ID: <20011007111715.M28720@cackle.proxima.alt.za> References: <20011007082859.I28720@cackle.proxima.alt.za> <20011007064220.188F1742E2@hork.ugcs.caltech.edu> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii In-Reply-To: <20011007064220.188F1742E2@hork.ugcs.caltech.edu>; from Quinn Dunkan on Sat, Oct 06, 2001 at 11:42:15PM -0700 Date: Sun, 7 Oct 2001 11:17:16 +0200 Topicbox-Message-UUID: ff87ac54-eac9-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 On Sat, Oct 06, 2001 at 11:42:15PM -0700, Quinn Dunkan wrote: > > mv does try to rename (uses dirwstat, I think), but you can only rename to the > same directory, check mv.c. There was a discussion a while back about how > hard cross directory renames are. Sorry to be pig-headed about this, but I guess I'm spoilt (Boyd, none of your sarcasm, please) with NetBSD doing it all for me. Thing is, I may be representative of a largish community of spoilt users, but there are also other considerations, for example, there may not be enough space for the copy, a situation made worse by the presence of a large time window in which race conditions can occur. Russ asks a pertinent question, how does one tell? I'm wondering, not being too good at the innards of Plan 9 and/or the filesystem, whether it would not be worth sacrificing the cleanliness of the filesystem to the ability to know. Yes, it is a slippery slope: once you can tell, why not move directories around, and so forth. All I can say in self-defence is that user convenience is being sacrificed here (I ought to know, but I can't remember how the various Windows flavours deal with the problem) and the sacrifice may be greater than the gain in simplicity. I'm sure I'm wrong, but I never quite understood the underlying limitation, so perhaps I can be pointed in the right direction and I'll shut up for good. ++L