From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu From: Maarit Maliniemi Message-ID: References: <3ba2a45af5c572e7280e465acb3a805a@plan9.bell-labs.com> Subject: Re: [9fans] dumb question Date: Fri, 5 Jul 2002 09:07:52 +0000 Topicbox-Message-UUID: c2e043b4-eaca-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 In article <3ba2a45af5c572e7280e465acb3a805a@plan9.bell-labs.com>, 9fans@cse.psu.edu wrote: > > Perhaps someone could explain why cp doesn't work recursively (without > > an option) when given a directory as a first argument. > > Because running cp that way would probably happen more often by mistake > than by intention, and it could damage a lot of files very fast before the > user noticed. > > -rob since the subject of damage has been raised i would like to mention that i have managed to damage tar files by using 'tar cf tarfile afile' (the intention was 'tar xf tarfile afile'). tar would be less dangerous if split into two. see inferno. i have also damaged whole file trees by doing 'tar cf adir - | {cd /missspelled/dir; tar xf -}' IMHO, it is less dangerous using 'cp -R'. bengt