bostic@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU (Keith Bostic) (06/05/90)
An issue has come up recently concerning how cp in 4.4BSD should behave. Historic cp's paid no attention to the type of the file being copied, therefore, "cp /dev/rmt0 foo" tried to read from tape. When the -r option was added, no changes were made, so cp continued to treat special files and symbolic links the same as before. It has been argued recently that "cp -r" should treat special files, including symbolic links, differently than the same files specified explicitly on the command line. We are considering changing cp's behavior so that when the -r option is specified to cp, only directories and files have their contents copied -- all special file types are recreated (if permissions allow). This would make "cp -r" roughly equivalent to tar piped to tar. The three issues are: -- Should cp, when it encounters a special file in the course of its tree walk, either ignore the file or attempt to create a special file with the same characteristics as the file it found? -- Should cp follow symbolic links by default, but create other special files as above when it finds one of these other special files? -- Should cp be completely backward compatible, i.e. its behavior when copying file hierarchies remain unchanged? Email to Keith Bostic (bostic@okeeffe.berkeley.edu, uunet!bostic).