On Sat, Mar 05, 2016 at 02:39:41AM +0100, Dmitrij D. Czarkoff wrote: > > This breaks doing something along the lines of ``yes n | cp -i [...]'' > > Why would anyone want that?
To simulate what in FreeBSD's and GNU's implementation of cp is the -n option, i.e. to only copy files that don't already exist at the destination. I'm not saying it is pretty, it just seems to be the only way to convince cp to do that, without relying on non-POSIX options.