fix: clarify that fs::rename on unix accepts targets that don't exist by sftse · Pull Request #149267 · rust-lang/rust (original) (raw)

The top of the paragraph already has the qualifier "when both from and to exist", so I think this is slightly redundant as written. This is a bit dense anyway so it wouldn't be bad to clean up the whole section. How about switching to a list format, something like:

This function currently corresponds to the rename function on Unix, and MoveFileExW with a fallback to SetFileInformationByHandle on Windows. The exact behavior differs:

• On Unix, when from is a directory and to exists, to must be an empty directory.
• On Unix, when from is not a directory and to exists, to may not be a directory.
• On Windows 10 version 1607 and above, the behavior is the same as Unix if the filesystem supports FileRenameInfoEx.
• Otherwise on Windows, from can be anything but to must not be a directory.
• If to does not exist, from can be anything.