From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: John Murdie Subject: Re: [9fans] dumb question To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Cc: John Murdie In-Reply-To: <3D1ADF63.52F4D74A@strakt.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/plain; charset=us-ascii Message-Id: Date: Thu, 27 Jun 2002 11:07:02 +0100 Topicbox-Message-UUID: bb8ba5e0-eaca-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 On 27 Jun, Boyd Roberts wrote: > 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. Perhaps someone could explain why cp doesn't work recursively (without an option) when given a directory as a first argument. -- John A. Murdie Experimental Officer (Software) Department of Computer Science University of York England