On Tuesday 04 May 2010, João Victor Martins wrote: >On Tue, May 04, 2010 at 10:36:19PM -0400, Gene Heskett wrote: >> I tried to "mv amanda* /home/amanda/*" as root and which >> which I recall I have done successfully several times before. > >The shell expand * _before_ passing the args to mv. So mv saw all >files starting with 'amanda' and all files (besides . hidden ones) in >/home/amanda/ as arg. It then picked the last one listed (probably >/home/amanda/tmp/) as destination. > I had two files whose names started with amanda in that directory. I would have assumed it would expand the src pattern of "amanda*" to match only those two files. And the rest of the files in /home/me, weren't bothered. No damages to the src directory at all other than removing the files.
If it expanded that * to include the whole thing, it should have moved the whole thing. It didn't. In past experience, the target path spec's /* has always served as just a place holder for the filenames actually selected by the amanda* in the src spec. That is not what it did this time. This time it created a tmp/ directory in /home/amanda, moved the whole amanda tree to the tmp directory, including the two files I actually asked it to move from /home/me/Download. No loss, but a very surprised veteran linux user. Someplace, the plans of mice and men have definitely gone aglay here, so I've included [email protected]. -- Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) Every nonzero finite dimensional inner product space has an orthonormal basis. It makes sense, when you don't think about it.
