dvc move path/to/some.tgz path/to/dir/

👉 dvc 0.23.2 installed via pip on ubuntu

dvc move path/to/some.tgz path/to/dir/ did something rather strange and unintuitive when I tried to move a file to a destination directory (without re-specifying the destination filename).

I expected it to behave like unix’s mv, which moves a file into the destination directory while keeping the same name, when a directory (with trailing slash) is specified as the destination, e.g. mv thing.txt path/to/dir/ results in path/to/dir/thing.txt.

So I started with directory structure:

data/some.tgz
data/some.tgz.dvc
sub/data/

And I ran the command:

$ dvc move data/some.tgz sub/data/

I ended up with the directory structure:

data/.dvc
data/sub/data
sub/data/

… which looks kind of like the directory data/ is now under dvc control, and the some.tgz was renamed to data/sub/data (a file with no extension). du -sh data/sub shows that data/sub/data is of the same file size as the original .tgz.

What I expected to end up with:

data/
sub/data/some.tgz
sub/data/some.tgz.dvc

I think that there are at least a couple bugs here.

1. It is clear in my syntax that I intended the destination to be a directory. dvc doesn’t seem to handle that syntax. It would be great if dvc could be updated to support this syntax — or, at the very least, to detect this syntax and give an error message to prevent the current behavior, which I can’t imagine is desired.
2. Might be irrelevant if you fix the first bug, but it seems something weird is happening with the paths here. How did the destination path (sub/data/) get somehow combined with the src path (data/some.tgz) to produce data/sub/data? 🤔

I was able to get myself out of this miss by dvc move data/sub/data data/some.tgz, which resulted in:

data/data/some.tgz
data/.dvc

Then I renamed data/.dvc to data/data/some.tgz.dvc and updated its path property to some.tgz. Then, finally, I ran dvc move data/data/some.tgz ../../sub/data/some.tgz, which is still running now, but I think might get me where I wanted to go in the first place. 🤞

[efiop]

@colllin 0.24.0 is out. Please feel free to upgrade 🙂

[efiop]

@colllin Sorry for the delay, we are preparing to release 0.24.0 with it this week. For now, you could try installing an upstream version with pip uninstall dvc && pip install git+https://github.com/iterative/dvc.