[TUHS] moving directories in svr2

Will Senn will.senn at gmail.com
Thu Dec 30 01:38:05 AEST 2021


That's fascinating. I always wondered how oldtimers were so facile with 
cpio and its ilk. If they had to use if for stuff like this, it's no 
wonder they built some muscle memory on it.

Thanks,

Will

On 12/29/21 9:02 AM, arnold at skeeve.com wrote:
> System V of that era didn't allow moving directories. You can copy them
> recursively with find and cpio with the option that makes hard links
> and then remove the old directory, or use a standard tar pipeline to
> copy the directory tree.
>
> BSD has always allowed moving directories; I *think* that descends
> from Research Unix but I don't remember for sure.
>
> HTH,
>
> Arnold
>
> Will Senn <will.senn at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I'm a little flummoxed in trying to move some directories around in
>> svr2. Shouldn't the following work?
>>
>>       mkdir a
>>       mkdir b
>>       mv a b
>>
>> I get the following error:
>> mv: b exists
>>
>> I tried many of the possible variants including:
>>
>>      mv a b/
>>      mv: b/ exists
>>      mv a b/a
>>      mv: directory rename only
>>      cd b
>>      mv ../a .
>>      mv: . exists
>>      mv ../a ./
>>      mv: ./ exists
>>      mv ../a ./a
>>      mv: directory rename only
>>
>>
>> If moving directories into existing directories wasn't allowed in those
>> days, 1) how were directories managed? and 2) when did moving
>> directories into directories become a thing?
>>



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