@mcc IMHO good for the coreutils maintainers for making...

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Matthew Miller

@mcc

IMHO good for the coreutils maintainers for making some of this stuff make more sense after all of these years.

But I'll wait for the "they hate Unix!" crowd to show up.

Like 30 June at 16:36 | Wall-to-wall | Open on hachyderm.io

7 comments

lj·rk

@mattdm @mcc Unfortunately `-n` doesn't seem to be race-free though :/

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/248544/mv-move-file-only-if-destination-does-not-exist/248547?noredirect=1#comment428238_248547

With that in mind (if still true), I don't see any worth in a `-n` flag (invoking the "it's not UNIX" meme here :D). Then again, while there are many very bad options added by the GNU project if you ask me (GNU/tar's --checkpoint-action flag springs to mind), but this'd be a really useful flag in principle.

30 June at 16:46 | Open on todon.eu

Matthew Miller

@ljrk @mcc

Haven't tested, but I believe that's been fixed sometime after 2015. From the release notes for 8.30 (2018):

``` 'mv -n A B' no longer suffers from a race condition that can
overwrite a simultaneously-created B. This bug fix requires
platform support for the renameat2 or renameatx_np syscalls, found
in recent Linux and macOS kernels. As a side effect, 'mv -n A A'
now silently does nothing if A exists.
[bug introduced with coreutils-7.1]
```