Re: wish: cp: output some sort of message if copying was interrupted

[Philip Rowlands]

On Sun, 24 May 2009, Elmar Stellnberger wrote:

>  If I issue a 'cp -a' on one konsole and a 'killall -s SIGINT cp' on
> another konsole cp -a will terminate just as if it had finished copying.

Not quite; the exit status passed to the calling process will show the 
signal used to terminate cp. This can in turn be used to diagnose a 
display any desired message, for example in bash:

$ PROMPT_COMMAND='[ $? -ne 0 ] && echo Command exited abnormally'
$ true
$ false
Command exited abnormally

Alternatively it would be possible to construct a signal-aware wrapper 
around cp and other interactive processes.

> My regard would be to let it print something like 'copying interrupted'
> (... and may be continued by issuing the same command once more).

As the tools already exist to build this feature it's not a good fit 
for adding to cp. The specific message regarding resumed copies would be 
highly dependent on the arguments to cp.


Cheers,
Phil