Re: cp -d dir patch for review (or 'xargs'?)

[Brian Dean]

On Fri, Apr 20, 2001 at 07:26:18PM -0700, Rodney W. Grimes wrote:

> > (cat bigfilelist; echo destdir) | xargs cp
> 
> I like this version of the patch!!  It's much much cleaner than
> hacking up cp or xargs, it even follows the unix principle of
> using simple tools and glueing them togeather to do bigger
> jobs, is unix implementation independent, and is very clear
> in what it does.

It's clean, simple, and unfortunately, totally bogus.

Try:

  echo 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 | xargs -n 4 echo

Now consider what would happen with the above suggested construct with
a very long file list.

I don't see a problem with adding an option to cp to treat the first
argument as the target instead of the last argument.  It's a simple
solution, the code change is simple, and it produces the exact desired
result.  What's the problem?

-Brian

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