Moving a File

Robert Brenstein rjb at robelko.com
Tue Mar 6 16:57:02 EST 2007


>>
>>I just don't get it, you take the Unix "move" command, call it 
>>"rename" and then stop it working like "move".
>
>That doesn't seem to be the case. Revolution's rename command (which 
>doesn't exist in unix) is mapped to the mv command (which does) and 
>uses the first form, which is also the default form. I see below 
>that there are several flags which affect whether the mv command 
>will prompt before overwriting a file. I assume that to keep things 
>simple, MetaCard used no flags in its interpretation of the mv 
>command and assumed the developer would handle fie duplicates in 
>scripts.
>

May be the relation of renaming to mv makes more sense if one 
realizes that renaming files in Unix is done using the mv, yes, the 
move command.

It makes as much sense as using rename to move ;-)

I gather the primary use of mv from MetaCard's perspective was to 
support renaming files, and the capability to actually move them came 
as bonus.

One could write wrapper functions, one to move and another to rename, 
each checking whether filenames and paths are changed or not changed 
as expected, and checking for existence of files that can be 
overwritten with a parameter controlling whether it is ok to do it. 
These could be added to IDE as revMoveFile and revRenameFile and 
leave the original rename for the brave ones :)

Robert



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