How does 'mv' rename directories?
Guy Harris
guy at auspex.auspex.com
Tue Sep 19 04:39:33 AEST 1989
>Also, [the rename system call is] useful on NFS systems, where the server
>you're mounting your filesystem from may not be a Unix system and may
>require some other (server-specific) technique to move files/directories; with
>rename(2), moves on remote-mounted filesystems are simply translated
>to appropriate calls to the NFS server. Mkdir and rmdir are also
>system calls on BSD or NFS systems, for much the same reasons.
And also because:
1) the remote server may not give clients the ability to get
root privileges (true both of NFS and RFS), so that even
set-UID "root" programs on the client may not have the root
privileges necessary to create, remove, or rename directories
in the "traditional" fashion;
and
2) the file system in question may, even if it's not a remote
file system, not look enough like a "traditional" UNIX file
system (either V7/S5 *or* BSD) for the "traditional" ways of
creating, removing, or renaming directories to work, since
systems with VFS or the File System Switch can have all sorts
of different file system types plugged into them.
S5R3, having both RFS and the File System Switch, also has "mkdir" and
"rmdir" system calls; unfortunately, they forgot "rename", but that'll
be fixed in S5R4.
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