coreutils: Trailing slashes

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1 2.9 Trailing slashes
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1 Some GNU programs (at least ‘cp’ and ‘mv’) allow you to remove any
1 trailing slashes from each SOURCE argument before operating on it.  The
1 ‘--strip-trailing-slashes’ option enables this behavior.
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1    This is useful when a SOURCE argument may have a trailing slash and
1 specify a symbolic link to a directory.  This scenario is in fact rather
1 common because some shells can automatically append a trailing slash
1 when performing file name completion on such symbolic links.  Without
1 this option, ‘mv’, for example, (via the system’s rename function) must
1 interpret a trailing slash as a request to dereference the symbolic link
1 and so must rename the indirectly referenced _directory_ and not the
1 symbolic link.  Although it may seem surprising that such behavior be
1 the default, it is required by POSIX and is consistent with other parts
1 of that standard.
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