Inconsistent behaviour stripping / from end of filenames

[Edward Avis]

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% mkdir test
% cd test
% touch a
% cp a/ b
cp: cannot stat `a/': Not a directory
% rm -v a/
removing `a'

It seems that rm strips the trailing slashes off a filename, even when
the file is not a directory.  But cp does not.  To me it seems kinda
wrong to accept the trailing slashes for a regular file, but anyway,
all the fileutils ought to have the same policy on this.

I went through all the programs of fileutils and found that chmod,
chown, rm and du will accept trailing slashes on regular file names.
All the others will (correctly, IMHO) give an error, usually 'Not a
directory'.  I didn't test mkdir, mknod, sync, dircolors or mkfifo.

The error message from touch is interesting:

% touch a
% touch a/
touch: creating `a/': Is a directory

I'm using fileutils 4.0.36 on Red Hat Linux 7.1 (glibc 2.2.2, Linux
2.4.3).

- -- 
Ed Avis <address@hidden>
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