Re: -x doesn't work in cp

[Jim Meyering]

Pär Lidén <address@hidden> wrote:
> It seems -x doesn't work in cp. When I tried to copy my whole "/"
> filesystem to a new, freshly formatted filesystem, cp did copy files in
> /devfs, /home and /proc, despite these being different filesystems. This
> is very bad, cause the whole process hung when cp tried to copy some files
> in /proc.
> The command line I used (while standing in "/") was
> cp -ax * /mnt
> with the new filesystem mounted on /mnt
>
> I'm using the testing distribution of Debian, with kernel 2.6.0-test3.
> The coreutils version reported by "cp --version" is 5.0, and Debian
> package management says 5.0-5.

Thanks for the report.
However, cp's -x option works fine if you use it the right way :-)
Try this next time:

  cp -ax / /mnt