serious bug in mv (and possibly other utilities)

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Article #620

#620

From: Thomas M. Breuel
Date: Wed, 12 Aug 1992 15:28

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GNU "mv" (binutils-beta-1.94) fails to interpret trailing slashes
correctly.  It has been a long-standing convention that a trailing
slash in a filename indicates that the filename refers to a directory.
This makes certain idioms much safer.  For example:

arolla$ > 1
arolla$ > 2
arolla$ /bin/mv 1 2/
mv: 1: rename: Not a directory
arolla$ 

Unlike SunOS "mv", GNU "mv" simply destroys file "2" despite the
trailing slash:

arolla$ > 1
arolla$ > 2
arolla$ mv 1 2/
arolla$ ll 1
ls: 1: No such file or directory
arolla$ ll 2
-rw-rw-r--   1 tmb      idiap           0 Aug 12 13:22 2

Since this behavior is extremely dangerous, I have remove GNU "mv" and
"cp" from our machines for the time being...

					Thomas.

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Message-ID: <9208121128.AA04695@idiap.ch>

Path: arc1-ca.pugleaf.net!sparky!uunet!cis.ohio-state.edu!idiap.CH!tmb

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Newsgroups: gnu.utils.bug
Path: arc1-ca.pugleaf.net!sparky!uunet!cis.ohio-state.edu!idiap.CH!tmb
From: tmb@idiap.CH (Thomas M. Breuel)
Subject: serious bug in mv (and possibly other utilities)
Message-ID: <9208121128.AA04695@idiap.ch>
Sender: gnulists@ai.mit.edu
Organization: GNUs Not Usenet
Distribution: gnu
Date: Wed, 12 Aug 1992 15:28:04 GMT
Approved: bug-gnu-utils@prep.ai.mit.edu
Lines: 27