Subject: Bug or dubious feature?

From: Linda Walsh <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 10 Sep 2013 13:48:37 -0700

I was trying to move a directory with the 'mv' command.

Instead of renaming the files it copied and deleted them.

The source and destination were the same disk which a stat of the source
and destination would confirm.

The "oddity", is that I was moving between
/usr/share/fonts -> /home/law/fonts where I use "rbind" to mount
part of home in /usr/share:

(fstab)
/home/share /usr/share  none  rbind

stat shows:

> stat -c %D /usr/share /home/share
fe03
fe03

So... why didn't it rename if the device numbers are the same?

I'm sure it wouldn't try a rename if I moved from /usr->/usr/share as
share is a different partition/device number, so it seems 'mv' does check
device id's to verify sameness upon move.  Then why not in moving
what was "effectively", /home/share/fonts/<dirname> => /home/law/fonts/. ?

It was only 12G of files, so it was done in ~ 5-10 minutes, but I was
expecting a few seconds...??

Coreutils 8.21/linux 3.9.11 / xfs filesystem.