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When a name is passed on the multipath command line, multipath assumes
it is a block device if it appears in the filesystem:

multipath/main.c:386:
if (filepresent(conf->dev))
        conf->dev_type = DEV_DEVNODE;
else if (sscanf(conf->dev, "%d:%d", &i, &i) == 2)
                conf->dev_type = DEV_DEVT;
        else
                conf->dev_type = DEV_DEVMAP;

This conflicts with the use of "-f" (flush map by name), in the case
that a file of the same name as the map exists in the current directory:

$ multipath -f mpath0
$ touch mpath0
$ multipath -f mpath0
must provide a map name to remove

The attached patch avoids this by adding a new function isblockdev() to
libmultipath/util.c and adding this to the DEV_DEVNODE condition. This
also means that we check for the case that what the user passed was a
character device, fifo etc.

It's probably also worth changing "-f" option to take an explicit
mapname argument, rather than just using argv[optind] after option
processing - I'll send another patch for that.

Kind regards,

Bryn.
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