Re: what will happen to the --reply option?

[Mark Rose]

Yeah, that's exactly the feature I've been wanting (only with mv instead of 
cp). I actually joined this list to figure out why it had been deprecated.

One day, when I have time to fully understand the source code, I'll sit down 
and write a "--no-overwrite" patch for mv and cp that silently ignores 
moving/copying files when a file with the same name exists at the 
destination.

--Mark

On Saturday 25 August 2007 11:57:55 pm alessandro salvatori wrote:
> My case is the exact opposite of what you are talking about.
> Irrespectively of the original files, i want to keep the existing files at
> the destination, even if older.
>
> and cp --reply=no, without any other fancy thing that would have avoided a
> prompt, was the sweetest thing to do. it was... :(
>
> cheers
> -Alessandro
>
> On 8/25/07, Bob Proulx <address@hidden> wrote:
> > Eric Blake wrote:
> > > Why not use "rsync --ignore-existing" instead?
> >
> > Agreed that rsync is definitely the right tool for this task.
> >
> > Most of the time when people are trying to avoid overwriting existing
> > files it is because they are trying to avoid spending the computer
> > time to do the copy again and not trying to avoid changing the file
> > again.  A large directory of large files, say a photo gallery, can
> > take a long time to complete a full copy for example.  In which case I
> > would not use the rsync --ignore-existing option even though it does
> > exactly answer the question.  That would not sync the file if the file
> > were different.  Instead I would simply let rsync determine that the
> > file has been copied correctly previously and skip copying it a second
> > time.  This is the sweet spot for rsync.
> >
> > To have rsync do this optimization the timestamp must be copied.  That
> > means that -t option must be present otherwise rsync acts similarly to
> > cp and the file will have a current timestamp.  I prefer -a because it
> > does the right thing and is equivalent to the -rlptgoD options.
> >
> >   rsync -a source/ destination/
> >
> > I prefer to use source to destdir/
> >
> >   rsync -a /path/to/src/somedir /path/to/dst/
> >
> > That would result in /path/to/dst/somedir when the rsync is finished.
> >
> > Bob