On Thursday 21 of January 2010 23:35:13 Peng Yu wrote: > Suppose I have directory a and b, the following command will copy the > content of a to b/a, rather than overwrite the directory 'b' by the > directory 'a'. I'm wondering if there is an option to overwrite 'b'? > > cp -r a b
I don't think something like that is possible with cp itself. It looks a bit dangerous to me anyway. Instead of that, there is a way to avoid the copy operation in such case: $ cp -r --no-target-directory a b If you want to destroy content of 'b' and replace with content of 'a', then you want to do this: $ rm -rf b; cp -r --no-target-directory a b Kamil
