Subject: bug#22584: cp could be more precise than "Not a directory"

From: Assaf Gordon <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 25 Oct 2018 09:45:11 -0600

severity 22584 wishlist
tags 22584 wontfix
close 22584
stop

(triaging old bugs)

On Tue, Feb 09, 2016 at 08:29:12AM +0100, Bernhard Voelker wrote:
> On 02/08/2016 10:28 PM, 積丹尼 Dan Jacobson wrote:
> > Ah ha, they just should have returned what the system calls said in the
> > first place, and not tinker with the output!
> > 
> > Them tinkering with the output only makes things worse.
> 
> Actually this _is_ an improvement:
> 
> After stat() has detected that the target does not exist, cp simply
> tries to open() it - and while it has a trailing slash, the kernel
> returns EISDIR:
> 
> stat("/tmp/My_DocVments/", 0x7ffdd335eee0) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
> ...
> open("/tmp/My_DocVments/", O_WRONLY|O_CREAT|O_EXCL, 0644) = -1 EISDIR (Is a directory)
> 
> Taking this over as-is, the error diagnostic would be quite confusing and
> plain wrong:
> 
>   cp: cannot create regular file ‘/tmp/My_DocVments/’: Is a directory
> 
> Therefore, the current mapping to ENOTDIR - introduced in coreutils-v8.8 -
> is the best we can do:
> 
>   $ cp .profile /tmp/My_DocVments/
>   cp: cannot create regular file ‘/tmp/My_DocVments/’: Not a directory
> 
> Your suggestion to say "no such file or directory" (ENOENT) would be misleading,
> because the target is treated by the system as a directory due to the trailing
> slash.
> 

With no further follow-ups to this thread, I'm closing this bug.

-assaf