Subject: bug#27986: 26.0.50; 'rename-file' can rename files without confirmation

From: Paul Eggert <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2017 10:25:25 -0700

On 09/11/2017 10:09 AM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> I think there was a confusion here between interactive and
> non-interactive uses of rename-file.  For interactive use, AFAIR we
> agreed that the behavior should stay as before, in particular to be
> consistent with e.g. invocation of 'mv' from the shell prompt.

That wasn't my understanding, and the email record is consistent with my 
interpretation. Although we discussed mv, the last comment on that topic 
was from John, who wrote about mv that "Making the Emacs version more 
restrictive, however, makes sense" (Bug#27986#145). This corresponds to 
the patch I installed, whose rename-file is more restrictive than mv 
because it balks at renaming a regular file F to G when G is not a 
directory name but happens to be an existing directory.

As I wrote, I don't think this will matter much in practice because the 
point is moot when file name completion is used. If I'm wrong and it is 
a significant problem, I can still implement the suggestion in 
Bug#27986#97 to ameliorate it. It may be better, though, to try out what 
we have now for a while, to see whether that suggestion would actually help.