On Wed, Aug 3, 2011 at 2:54 PM, Thomas Jollans <t...@jollybox.de> wrote:
> > On 03/08/11 23:25, Dan Stromberg wrote: > > > Interesting. Of course, it's probably readily available to you. > What > > > *ix are you seeing that doesn't include cpio by default? > > > > Arch Linux - the base install is quite minimal. > Hmmmm... So we're probably not talking about portability to Android... Because it's too minimal, too different? >> Which implementations of cp don't implement -R and -l? >> >> >> Probably most of them, except GNU and newer BSD. > > Okay. While GNU libc manuals usually document how portable functions are > in detail, that's not true for the GNU coreutils manuals. You don't really need it in the coreutils doc. I'd feel very safe assuming that 98+% of all *ix's (not counting Android) either have cpio installed by default, or can easily get it via their native package manager. The same isn't true of a cp with new features. > I don't think cpio is in GNU coreutils. Also, I think GNU cpio is a > reimplementation, not the original. Indeed. But cp is in the coreutils, and that was what we were talking about. > Sorry. Maybe you should describe what you believe we -are- talking about, then? I guess I missed that. I thought it was portability. > As for GNU cpio, that's simply what /usr/bin/cpio, if present, is > expected to be on a GNU/Linux system. > Well, yes, but: 1) GNU/Linux is important 2) GNU/Linux isn't the end all and be all (I wrote:) > cpio's been around since PWB/Unix, which sits between 6th Edition Unix > and 7th Edition. It should be in just about everything, unless a > vendor/distributor got pretty zealous about cutting duplicate utilities. I guess this is boiling down to "A pure python solution might be better, since some folks don't like to use their package managers" Also, a pure python solution should work on windows - these shell commands don't unless you have one of the many ports of *ix tools to windows installed.
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