You are renaming report.txt to report.old and are not certain whether a report.old already exists. Which command performs the rename but asks for confirmation before overwriting an existing destination?
LPIC-1 Exam 101-500, objective 103. GNU and Unix commands easy
Machine-checked — no person has signed for it. This question was read against the source cited below by an automated pass, which found no contradiction. That is a weaker claim than it sounds: the same kind of process wrote the question, so it can confirm its own mistake.
Treat it as a good draft rather than as settled fact, and read the source below before you rely on it. It is not used in mock exams here — only questions a person has signed for are.
How these questions are written — where each question comes from, what the verification ledger records, and what happens when one is found wrong.
The options
Correct mv -i report.txt report.old
Correct. -i makes mv prompt before overwriting an existing destination file, and the move proceeds only if the answer begins with y.
Not correct mv -f report.txt report.old
Wrong, and the opposite. -f overwrites without any prompt, suppressing even a confirmation that an alias such as mv='mv -i' would otherwise produce.
Not correct mv -n report.txt report.old
Wrong for the requirement. -n never overwrites an existing file, but it also never asks: the move is silently skipped and report.txt stays where it is.
Not correct mv -b report.txt report.old
Wrong for the requirement. -b overwrites, but first renames the existing destination to report.old~ as a backup. No question is asked.
Why
mv and cp share the same three-way policy for an existing destination: -i asks, -f forces, -n declines, and when more than one is given the last on the command line wins. rm has -i and -f but no -n; its bulk-safety option is -I, which prompts once when more than three files are being removed. mv with two arguments on the same filesystem is only a directory-entry change, which is why renaming a large file is instantaneous while moving it to another filesystem is a copy followed by a delete.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- manual page mv(1)
Practise this
Reading one question is not practice. The trainer will draw a short set from objective 103 and space the ones you get wrong.
More questions on this objective
- A user starts a new terminal window in a running graphical desktop session, which launches bash as an interactive shell that is NOT a login shell. Which file in the user's home directory does bash read in that case? machine-checked
- In bash, which history expansion re-runs the entire previous command line? machine-checked
- Which bash command prints the literal five characters $USER instead of the current user name? machine-checked
- You want /opt/bin searched for executables, after all the directories already in PATH, in the current bash session and in every command started from it. Which command does that? machine-checked
- There is a passwd manual page in section 1 (the command) and another in section 5 (the /etc/passwd file format). Which command opens the section 5 page? machine-checked
- Select the TWO true statements about shell variables and the environment in bash. machine-checked