I apologize for this question being off-topic, but I know someone will be able to give me an answer on this forum. This is probably more of a system-specific (Linux 2.4) programming question.

rename(2) (and, therefore, Perl's own rename function) does not report an error when a file is renamed to itself. What is even more interesting, mtime of parent directory is not changed, either. So, nothing happens, but no error is reported? Why?

Some code: 

perl -e '$s = rename("tags", "tags"); print STDOUT ($s ? "OK" : "FAIL"
+), "\n";'

[download]

C code: 

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <errno.h>

int
main (int argc, char **argv)
{
    int rs;

    rs = rename(argv[1], argv[1]);

    if (-1 == rs) {
        fprintf(stderr, "Error renaming %s: %s\n", argv[1], strerror(e
+rrno));
    } else {
        printf("Rename of %s is OK\n", argv[1]);
    }

    exit(0);
}

[download]

In reply to [OT] rename(2) -- renaming file to itself produces no error. by dmitri

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