Package: coreutils Version: 8.4-2 Severity: important when files are created inside a directory during a `mv` of a the directory, those files are deleted at the end of the move.
this typically happens when moving large (in terms of amount of data) directories across file systems. to reproduce, you need a current directory on a different partition than your `/tmp`, then do $ mkdir /tmp/movetest $ mkdir movetest $ dd if=/dev/zero of=movetest/bigfile bs=1024 count=300000 300000+0 records in 300000+0 records out 307200000 bytes (307 MB) copied, 11.4315 s, 26.9 MB/s (it is important that the file is big enough to take some seconds to create and read) $ mv movetest /tmp/movetest/ &; sleep 3; echo foobar > movetest/latefile [1] + done mv movetest /tmp/movetest/ $ ls -lamovetest ls: cannot access movetest: No such file or directory $ ls -la /tmp/movetest total 300348 drwxr-xr-x 2 chrysn chrysn 4096 Apr 13 12:21 . drwxrwxrwt 158 root root 45056 Apr 13 12:21 .. -rw-r--r-- 1 chrysn chrysn 307200000 Apr 13 12:21 bigfile you see that the `latestfile` has vanished. no such behavior is documented in the man page. i suggest that `mv` should only delete the files it has successfully moved, and then should behave like `rmdir` for removing the directories. i'm indifferent on whether it should just print a warning that some folders could not be removed because they are not empty and return successfully or set a non-zero exit status. (there could be flags to modify the behavior, eg one to restore the old behavior and one to make mv fail if the directories can't be removed.) -- System Information: Debian Release: squeeze/sid APT prefers unstable APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental') Architecture: amd64 (x86_64) Kernel: Linux 2.6.33-2-amd64 (SMP w/2 CPU cores) Locale: LANG=en_GB.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash Versions of packages coreutils depends on: ii libacl1 2.2.49-2 Access control list shared library ii libc6 2.10.2-6 Embedded GNU C Library: Shared lib ii libselinux1 2.0.94-1 SELinux runtime shared libraries coreutils recommends no packages. coreutils suggests no packages. -- debconf-show failed -- To use raw power is to make yourself infinitely vulnerable to greater powers. -- Bene Gesserit axiom
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