On Wed, Nov 19, 2014, at 09:55, Dimitris Papastamos wrote: > Regarding your question on cp -f then the answer is not quite. > > cp -f will try to unlink the destination if it fails to open it for > whatever > reason.
And if the target is running and writing to a running binary is a problem, opening it will fail with [ETXTBSY], meaning it will be unlinked. You can argue about whether that is the purpose or something else (permission errors within a directory you own) is the purpose, but it will certainly solve that problem.