[ python-Bugs-1076515 ] shutil.move clobbers read-only files.

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Bugs item #1076515, was opened at 2004-12-01 06:40
Message generated for change (Comment added) made by loewis
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Category: Python Library
Group: None
Status: Open
Resolution: None
Priority: 5
Submitted By: Jeremy Fincher (jemfinch)
>Assigned to: Nobody/Anonymous (nobody)
Summary: shutil.move clobbers read-only files.

Initial Comment:
The summary states it fine.  shutil.move happily overwrites read-
only files.

It looks like it indiscriminately catches OSError, and never bothers 
to check whether it's a permission error.

It'd be nice if permission errors raised an exception that was a 
subclass of OSError, then it'd be cake to fix this (at least for 
*nices; I'm not sure about the Windows implications).

According to tracker #810879, clobbering read-only files isn't the 
desired behavior for shutil.copyfile, so I doubt it's desired for 
shutil.move.

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>Comment By: Martin v. Löwis (loewis)
Date: 2006-04-12 10:06

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I don't think I will do anything about this anytime soon, so
unassigning myself.

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Comment By: Johannes Gijsbers (jlgijsbers)
Date: 2004-12-06 23:21

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Your analysis is not correct. On Unix, you need write
permission to the *directory* to rename. So the os.rename()
call simply succeeds on a read-only file if you have write
access to its parent directory. I think we could shield from
this by always using the fallback implementation
(copy2+unlink(src)), but I'm not sure what the implications
of that would be (qua performance and cross-platform issues).

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