I recently upgraded my WordPress installation (it was way way way out of date) and I thought it was weird that my old plugins weren’t showing up after the upgrade. It turns out that when I tell Transmit, the most convenient mac ftp application that I’ve found to date, to replace a folder, it deletes the old one and replaces all of it’s contents with the folder I’m uploading. This makes perfect sense in terms of the english language, but it’s not at all how I expect things to work based on years of ftp experience. In Transmit, if I want leave subfolders and files that aren’t on my local copy, I have to choose merge. Lesson: be careful with “apply to all” check boxes when playing with new software.
If that surprises you, try the same thing locally – no, I’m kidding, don’t! The same thing happens on the mac locally, so the program is pretty consistent.
It just isn’t consistent with what the rest of the world does.
It took me a while to figure out what you meant. I guess I had never tried to move a folder to a location that already contained a folder with the same name before, but it does indeed erase the entire folder then or move the new folder over. I can’t replicate the issue at the command line, as mv refuses to remove a non-empty folder.