29 Dec
2021
29 Dec
'21
9:38 p.m.
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(a)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(a)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?
>