Re: cp and "blah/." or "." as a source

[Eric Blake]

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According to Zak on 12/3/2006 8:57 AM:
> Hi,
> 
> What should happen when I copy a directory ending in "/." to another
> directory?  Like:
>     cp -a src/. dst
...
> 
> This means it handles dotfiles as well - a much neater way to copy them
> than using ugly wildcards, tar, rsync, find or whatever else.  The
> documentation doesn't make it clear (to me anyway) what /should/ happen
> here, but I'd guess (wildly) that POSIX says cp should fail and do
> nothing rather than do what it does.

- -a is a GNU extension, so POSIX says nothing about how it behaves.  But
the GNU documentation ('cp --help', for instance) says it is short for cp
- -dpPR, which means it copies entire hierarchies, recursively, preserving
attributes and symlinks.  It should not matter whether you spell the
source as 'src/.' or the shorter 'src', since both spellings name the same
hierarchy.

>  So what I'm really looking for
> here is to have the current behaviour classified one way (correct, and
> explicitly stated as the expected outcome in the docs)

Yes, the behavior you posted looks like it matches the documentation.

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

Eric Blake             address@hidden
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