Re: New feature in mv

[Raphael S Carvalho]

On Tue, Dec 4, 2012 at 11:34 PM, Pádraig Brady <address@hidden> wrote:
> On 12/05/2012 01:25 AM, Raphael S Carvalho wrote:
>>
>> On Tue, Dec 4, 2012 at 11:05 PM, Pádraig Brady <address@hidden> wrote:
>>>
>>> On 12/05/2012 12:45 AM, Raphael S Carvalho wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Tue, Dec 4, 2012 at 10:22 PM, Pádraig Brady <address@hidden> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> On 12/04/2012 05:04 PM, Paweł Lampe wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Hi there !
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Few minutes ago, my mate asked me 'is there any way to swap two
>>>>>> files ?'. I have realized, that the mv has option -S but it's all
>>>>>> about
>>>>>> suffix. I think, there should be also -s for swapping. It should work
>>>>>> like:
>>>>>> mv -s a b
>>>>>> Effect should be like:
>>>>>> a -> tmp
>>>>>> b -> a
>>>>>> tmp -> b
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Think about it
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> A fairly useful feature, but something as noted here
>>>>> that might be more suited to a separate script,
>>>>> that could be maintained within coreutils under the
>>>>> recently mentioned contrib/ directory
>>>>>
>>>>> http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-coreutils/2009-02/msg00014.html
>>>>>
>>>>> thanks,
>>>>> Pádraig.
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> I read this page:
>>>> http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-coreutils/2009-02/msg00014.html
>>>> So I would really like to create that program. Is it still even needed?
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Cool, thanks!
>>>
>>> I would prototype a script in shell,
>>> with possibly some of the same considerations as in this "rewrite"
>>> script,
>>> http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-coreutils/2010-03/txtNTX6owUFov.txt
>>>
>>> thanks,
>>> Pádraig.
>>
>>
>> I was thinking about writing such a program using C language, though
>> I'm not sure if it would be the best choice. I could search for the
>> best data exchange algorithm, so making the program fast and useful.
>> I'm not sure if they(maintainers) would accept a new program in the
>> core-utils. As I'm seeing, the program would provide a way to exchange
>> data between two files, besides changing filenames. Should another
>> one(feature) be implemented?
>> I also thought about using Python.
>
>
> The idea here is that swapping files would be just a thin
> wrapper around the mv or cp or ln utilities which
> already do the heavy lifting in C for copying data
> around (often using complicated techniques), or
> in fact just renaming as appropriate.
>
> thanks,
> Pádraig.

So what do you think? Which language should I use? I'm going to sleep
in few minutes, so I would get started tomorrow.

As Bernhard Voelker we could create a C program which would use those
tools (mv, cp, ln).

Anyway, thanks for answering.
Raphael S.Carvalho <address@hidden>