I must have read your post too quickly (sorry) and with a Un*x bias I guess. What I meant is the following.

rename(2) semantics on Un*x is pretty consistent these days given by the "single Unix spec". One could argue ad infinitum if a good choice of semantics was made: rename just clobbers destination if it exists. IMHO this is a decent choice consistent with the positive bias Un*x calls have had from the start, which was permit as much as possible as fast as possible, OK when you look at the whole library construction from a legolike perspective.

I just tested rename with perl5.8.3 on HP-UX 11.0, and perl5.8.7 cygwin-1.5.24-2, and perl just follows the underlying lib. semantics as perldoc says. Sadly this means that the direct use of rename is likely to be non-portable, but is usually the case when you have a direct interface to system calls.

Un*x rename semantics is not enough in practice and usually you want something closer to the Un*x mv(1) semantics also defined by "the single unix spec". Especially mv does a copy/delete action when src and dest are on different filesystems. Giving us a portable useful interface should be the purpose of File::Copy:move and friends.

I remember some heated discussion on p5p (around 5.8.0 I guess) about having select with character semantics, and the motivation for some was essentially that windows does it. IMHO the whole thing was madness and a bad application of the "DWIM principle". I guess that perl, due to its Un*x heritage has given us incondicional access to low level libs, the "makes hard things possible" principle, but "DWIM" should apply to clean, powerful, platform-ind and useful abstractions.

cheers --stephan p.s the version of the "Single Unix Spec" used is v.2, pretty old...

In reply to Re^5: file::move and networks by sgt
in thread file::move and networks by philc

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.