From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: <3D1ADF63.52F4D74A@strakt.com> From: Boyd Roberts MIME-Version: 1.0 To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Subject: Re: [9fans] dumb question References: <171e27d5f2cfd12a9303117e58818e5b@plan9.bell-labs.com>, <34f1.3d1a2d31.11d9f@blake.inputplus.co.uk> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Date: Thu, 27 Jun 2002 11:48:19 +0200 Topicbox-Message-UUID: bb6da202-eaca-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 Ralph Corderoy wrote: > tar did the job, more or less, and so no one could be bothered to extend > cp. I'm sure this has come up some months ago. cp never did the job. And a good thing too, until the -r option was added by BSD (I guess). A back-to-back tar or a find | cpio -pdm (if you had cpio) was always the method. The point being that copying directory trees is a rare operation and it doesn't merit breaking cp for the small functionality gain. As rob said, the pipe doesn't cost that much and having a reader and a writer process probably increases the i/o throughput. As I look at debian now I see cp has 25 options, modified in turn by 2 environment variables, and it pretty much implements tar. I don't call that progress.