On 30/03/11 12:56, Thomas Hofmann wrote: > Hello, > > two issues: > 1) manpage of cp contains obsolete email-address for bug-reporting
That is fixed in current versions > 2) cp inconsistency when copying a directory to a) a non existing > directory, or b) to an existing directory. Further elaborated below. > > cp -a SOME_DIR NOT_YET_EXISTING_DIR > > results in a new directory directly containing each entry of SOME_DIR > > while: > CP -a SOME_DIR EXISTING_DIR > > results in EXISTING_DIR/SOME_DIR > > The first result seems to be a reasonable outcome in both cases. > Appending "/" to the directory-names should lead to the same result. > While appending "/." to the target-directory would change the meaning, > and rather lead to the result of the observed second version. So you would like cp -a dir dest_dir # copy dir/* to dest_dir/ cp -a dir dest_dir/ # copy dir to dest_dir/ That seems a bit subtle to me. Currently one can get the first behavior using `cp -aT` so I'll close this. Note also the related: http://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=7450 cheers, Pádraig.
