*BSD News Article 47610


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From: dobrien@seas.gwu.edu (David O'Brien)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: "foo is a directory" error
Date: 30 Jul 1995 03:03:24 GMT
Organization: George Washington University
Lines: 31
Message-ID: <3vesps$45s@cronkite.seas.gwu.edu>
References: <npu48aada8.fsf@enci.ucalgary.ca> <3v6697$i5r@godzilla.zeta.org.au>
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Bruce Evans (bde@zeta.org.au) wrote:
: In article <npu48aada8.fsf@enci.ucalgary.ca>,
: Gord Matzigkeit <gord@enci.ucalgary.ca> wrote:
: >I have one minor nit with FreeBSD-2.0.5-950622-SNAP:
: >
: >bartok% mkdir hello; touch hello/foo ; /bin/rm -rf hello
: >bartok% mkdir hello; touch hello/foo ; /bin/rm -rf hello/
: >rm: hello/: Is a directory
: 
: A ever funnier example:
: 
: 	$ rmdir /etc/passwd/
: 	rmdir: /etc/passwd/: Is a directory
: 
: >This is bad.  It breaks many GNU programs, such as bash's filename
: >completion, strip, and any others who like to say "hello/".

And Tcsh and Zsh.  You can use the GNU fileutilites and have the
functionality you want (including ``ls -F link-to-dir'' displaying the link
like ls vs. ls -l.

If you want to compile the GNU utils, you need to run ./configure and then
add ``#define _ANSI_SOURCE'' to the resulting config.h.  Everything other
than dd will then compile.  Otherwise you don't get install, chown, and a
few others.

The maintainer of the GNU fileutils as volenteered to make the utils handle
FreeBSD 2.x correctly.  However he needs a login to a FreeBSD box.  Can
anybody offer a login that isn't blocked by a firewall?

-- David O'Brien    (obrien@sea.legent.com)