bug#15926: RFE: unlink command already uses 'unlink' call; make 'rm' use (original) (raw)

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From: Eric Blake
Subject: bug#15926: RFE: unlink command already uses 'unlink' call; make 'rm' use 'remove' call
Date: Wed, 20 Nov 2013 06:44:01 -0700
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:24.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/24.1.0

On 11/19/2013 11:45 PM, Bernhard Voelker wrote:

On 11/20/2013 03:19 AM, Eric Blake wrote: > Yes, the 'rm -rf .' case appears to be a regression in coreutils that is > contrary to the behavior required by POSIX. That is: > > $ mkdir /tmp/foo /tmp/foo/sub > $ cd /tmp/foo > $ rm -r . > rm: cannot remove directory: ‘.’ > $ ls > sub > > appears to be a bug in current coreutils, because it should have > successfully called rmdir("sub") prior to failing on the attempt to > rmdir(".").

I disagree: see at the top of:

http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/rm.html

If either of the files dot or dot-dot are specified as the basename portion of an operand (that is, the final pathname component) or if an operand resolves to the root directory, rm shall write a diagnostic message to standard error and do nothing more with such operands.

Ah, that's where it is. I was looking in the numbered steps, not the paragraph before the numbered steps. So it appears that coreutils is compliant after all.

Maybe "cannot remove directory" is a bit weak - it's more like "refusing to remove dot|dot-dot|root directory".

Indeed, a clearer error message would be possible.

-- Eric Blake eblake redhat com +1-919-301-3266 Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org

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