On Dec 28, 2009, at 5:48 AM, Andrei Popescu wrote: > Unless I'm doing something wrong 'cp -a .*' will try to copy the parent > directory as well
Hmm. Bears looking into. But I swear I've been doing '.*' forever. Maybe that explains the high disk drive bills :-) > The correct solution > from my tests seems to be to use '.' with either > > cp -a source/. destination/ That looks like a request to copy a directory. So '.' gets invisibles? Didn't know that... No, wait a minute. '.' is the current dir. So 'source/.' should mean 'source/<current>'?? What shell are you using? ... <grabs a terminal and types> Nope. You're absolutely right. In bash, 'ls .*' does what I expected, but 'cp -a .*' does do the parent, like you said. 'cp .*' doesn't, though. It just doesn't copy invisible directories. Huge apologies -- especially to the OP. Now I wonder what it is I *have* been doing for all that cp'ing for so long... I still don't understand how 'source/.' would work, though. -- Glenn English g...@slsware.com -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org