Calling `gsutil mv` on a directory/prefix will incorrectly construct destination object path(s) if the destination prefix is a substring of the source prefix

For example gsutil -m mv gs://bucket/dir/subdir1 gs://bucket/dir/subdir2 sometimes correctly renames to gs://bucket/dir/subdir2, but other times to gs://bucket/dir/subdir2/subdir1

Coulnd’t pinpoint exactly conditions, but it seems it has nothing to do with trailing slashes. In any case there is nothing about such bahaviour in the docs.

[mfschwartz]

If there’s an existing subdirectory called gs://buciket/dir/subdir2 before you run that mv command it will put subdir1 under subdir2. That is correct behavior - it emulates similar behavior of Unix directory renames. Please see https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/gsutil/commands/cp#how-names-are-constructed for more details.

[crunchiness]

@mfschwartz I understand but this was not the case. I tried it again just to make sure.

$ mkdir dir
$ touch dir/file
$ gsutil cp -r dir gs://bucket/
$ gsutil mv gs://bucket/dir gs://bucket/dir2
$ gsutil ls gs://bucket/dir2
gs://bucket/dir2/dir/

unfortunately, it’s seems to be hard to reproduce though, I ran this once and it misbehaved, but then 3 times it worked as expected (with different names every time)

gsutil version: 4.19