cp command interactive mode priority

[dan1]

Hello.

I have been surprised by the way 'cp' handles the '-i' (interactive) mode.
I expected the '-i' to be low priority. I mean that if we would add '-f' to 
force the copy, this would override the '-i' option.
Also, I think that putting -i by default would be good, but this is a plus.
People are well aware that copying a file on another normally generates an 
error.
If they expect this error to happen, then they will just add a '-f' and no 
questions anymore.

Now I am having problems using this command. I could use the default RHEL 4 
alias which is 'cp -i', but then we cannot add anymore the -f command to 
force copying.

Thus, putting the '-f' command to override the '-i' would be extremely 
useful. Alos, if somebody has defined this '-f', then it means that he 
really wanted to overwrite existing files.
This means that we would be able to put a command like 'cp -i -f ... ...' 
and this would copy the files and overwrite the existing files without any 
notice.

I also suggest to put the '-i' command by default because this is much safer 
for the user, and for this reason obviously some distro makes it an alias. 
However i know that such changes can sometimes mix up existing users and is 
delicate. Not so for the '-f' option to be the highest priority, this is 
safe to my point of view.

I hope this could be done. I'm sure this will help make things simpler for 
lot of people. You can have a look at google with 'cp overwrite'. E.g.:
http://groups.google.ch/group/comp.os.linux.misc/browse_thread/thread/6f4d8a13c0247ec3/f510ccaaacf655b0?q=cp+overwrite&rnum=25&hl=fr#f510ccaaacf655b0

Everybody thinks that this is a bug. Me also..

Thank you for your time and help in that matter.

Kind regards,
Daniel