Package: coreutils Version: 7.4-2 Severity: normal If I create a directory structure such as the following:
a: total 2 drwxr-xr-x 2 bmc bmc 1024 2009-06-11 21:06 dir lrwxrwxrwx 1 bmc bmc 4 2009-06-11 21:06 link -> ../b a/dir: total 0 lrwxrwxrwx 1 bmc bmc 7 2009-06-11 21:06 link -> ../../b b: total 2 -rw-r--r-- 1 bmc bmc 5 2009-06-11 21:06 file and then run "cp -aL a/* c", then the copies of file (in c) become hard links to each other. This behavior is not documented, and it does not occur if I use -LR instead of -aL. It appears to be triggered by --preserve=links. My opinion is that this behavior is incorrect[0], but I don't care very much one way or the other. If this behavior is intentional, it should be clearly documented in the manual page, at the very least. Either changing the behavior or documenting the behavior[1] is satisfactory for me. A shell script is attached that demonstrates this problem. [0] That is, --preserve=links should preserve symlinks as symlinks and hard links as hard links. Just because -L forces all symlinks to be dereferenced does not mean that I want to "preserve" symlinks as hard links. [1] This information should be present in the manual page, not just in the info page (which I almost never read). -- System Information: Debian Release: squeeze/sid APT prefers unstable APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental') Architecture: amd64 (x86_64) Kernel: Linux 2.6.30-rc8-amd64 (SMP w/2 CPU cores) Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash Versions of packages coreutils depends on: ii libacl1 2.2.47-2 Access control list shared library ii libattr1 1:2.4.43-2 Extended attribute shared library ii libc6 2.9-13 GNU C Library: Shared libraries ii libselinux1 2.0.71-1 SELinux shared libraries coreutils recommends no packages. coreutils suggests no packages. -- no debconf information -- brian m. carlson / brian with sandals: Houston, Texas, US +1 713 440 7475 | http://crustytoothpaste.ath.cx/~bmc | My opinion only OpenPGP: RSA v4 4096b 88AC E9B2 9196 305B A994 7552 F1BA 225C 0223 B187
#!/bin/sh
rm -fr a b c
[ -d a ] || mkdir a
[ -d a/dir ] || mkdir a/dir
[ -d b ] || mkdir b
[ -d c ] || mkdir c
echo "File" > b/file
(cd a && ln -sf ../b link)
(cd a/dir && ln -sf ../../b link)
cp -aL a/* c
for i in c/link/file c/dir/link/file
do
printf "%16s: " $i
stat -c "%08d %08i %h" $i
done
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature
