Re: cp -i: "sucker Holmes" questions

[Eric Blake]

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According to Dan Jacobson on 11/12/2006 9:19 AM:
> Seen on Debian coreutils 5.97-5:

Consider upgrading to stable coreutils 6.4, as the 5.9x series is no
longer actively maintained, and as there were a number of changes made to
cp in the meantime.

>    $ cp -i b a
>    cp: overwrite `a', overriding mode 0644? y
>    cp: cannot create regular file `a': Permission denied
>    $ ls -dl ? .
>    drwxr-xr-x 2 jidanni jidanni 60 2006-11-07 01:30 .
>    -rw-r--r-- 1 root    root     0 2006-11-07 01:29 a
>    -rw-r--r-- 1 jidanni jidanni  0 2006-11-07 01:29 b

Sorry, but POSIX requires this behavior.
http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/cp.html

In fact, the NEWS for 6.4 states the following:
  cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
  action was bound to fail.  This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.

- --
Life is short - so eat dessert first!

Eric Blake             address@hidden
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