file FTPed to another destination?

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hi,

The scenario which I am describing here is strange but not a product of my imagination!

I have a SFTP script which gets file from remote server to a local directory say (/home/dips/ftp/my_files) inside my_files/ there's another sub-dir archive/

The strange scenario is that once while FTPing a huge encrypted file (~570000000 bytes) the file got pulled to archive/ and not to the my_files/ as should be the case. When I saw the file in archive/ I issued the command to move it to my_files/ as the other processes would expect it to be there. And when I executed the below command:

 
$pwd
/home/dips/ftp/my_files
$mv archive/remote_file.csv.gpg .

It did that in literally one second!! which is not possible as the file is huge and it takes lots of minutes to move from one directory to another.

Now I am puzzled is the above scenario a plausible one? Please explain

-dips

2

mv has two options:

  1. if the file is in the same filesystem from source to destination, just move the file's metadata from one directory to another.
  2. If the destination is on another filesystem, then cp the file.