directory copying with cp; broken?

Greyham Stoney greyham at ausonics.OZ
Wed Sep 28 11:56:37 AEST 1988


in article <8540 at smoke.ARPA>, gwyn at smoke.ARPA (Doug Gwyn ) says:
> 
> In article <35 at ausonics.OZ> greyham at ausonics.OZ (Greyham Stoney) writes:
>>... surely changing a directory into a regular file is a bit inconsistent?.
> 
> "cp" is not changing anything; it's making a copy of the contents of a
> file.  It wouldn't be safe for that to be turned into an actual
> directory since at least the "." entry in it would be incorrect.

Minor semantic point. Come on, you know what I was getting at. No, I wasn't
proposing it should create a directory, but rather that it made more sense to
reject the copy (or just copy the directory contents and do away with the -r
flag). Just depends on how you look at it I guess.
				Greyham

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