a serious bug in "mv"

[Jarkko Laukkanen]

Hi,

I have found a pretty serious bug in "mv" that caused me to lose important
work-related data.

I had a directory "Dir" and two files there "A.txt" and "B.txt". The "A.txt"
was a big study report I received, and the "B.txt" was a report I was writing
on my examination on the first report.

I was working in the parent directory of the "Dir", and wrote "mv Dir/*.*" to
move the contents of "Dir" to another hard disk, but unintentionally hit the
"Enter" when I was about to hit "Shift".

The action "mv Dir/*.*" did not report any error condition. Instead, it
copied the "A.txt" into "B.txt" by keeping the original name "B.txt", and
hence I lost the "B.txt".

I simply do not believe this behavior is intentional, nor "as planned".

Regards,

- --
     Jarkko K. Laukkanen, Ph.D.
     Division of X-ray Physics, Department of Physical Sciences,
     University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland.

     WWW: http://www.physics.helsinki.fi/~jklaukka/

     "That may be true," he acknowledged, "but it's completely
     accurate, and as long as the answer is right, who cares if
     the question is wrong? If you want sense, you'll have to
     make it yourself."
                          'The Phantom Tollbooth' by Norton Juster