Pádraig, Thank you very much indeed for responding so quickly and thoroughly. As you suggest, instead of "cp -Tipruvx ..." I am now using "cp -Tpruivx ..." ("-i" after "-u"), which works just fine. Many thanks, and kind regards, Bob.
________________________________ From: Pádraig Brady <pixelb...@gmail.com> on behalf of Pádraig Brady <p...@draigbrady.com> Sent: Sunday, May 12, 2024 11:49 To: Robert Hill <hill-rob...@hotmail.com>; 70...@debbugs.gnu.org <70...@debbugs.gnu.org> Subject: Re: bug#70887: In coreutils 9.5, "cp" command does not honor "--interactive" option On 12/05/2024 00:03, Robert Hill wrote: > After upgrading coreutils from 9.0 to 9.5, the following change occurred: > > In coreutils 9.0, the command "cp -Tipruvx /src-dir /dst-dir" requested > interactive confirmation before replacing an old destination file with a > newer source file, as expected. > > In coreutils 9.5, the command "cp -Tipruvx /src-dir /dst-dir" no longer > requests interactive confirmation, but just goes ahead and replaces old > destination files with newer source files, which is not expected. > > Thank you in advance for looking at this, Bob. Right. The thinking was for 9.3 that the new long form --update={older,all} options would override a previous -i, especially as -i was commonly set in root users' cp and mv aliases on Red Hat flavored distros. Then in 9.5 we expanded this so -u behaved the same as --update=older. In retrospect, users can avoid these aliases in various ways, and the protective -i option should really combine with -u rather than being overridden by it. For completeness, -i following -u would always reinstate the protection. The attached changes the behavior back to that -i is never overridden. thanks, Pádraig