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bug#16889: erratic behavior of cp command i.e while copying files (using


From: Bernhard Voelker
Subject: bug#16889: erratic behavior of cp command i.e while copying files (using *) from one directory to another directory
Date: Wed, 26 Feb 2014 18:10:54 +0100
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:24.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/24.3.0

tag 16889 notabug
close 16889
thanks

On 02/26/2014 01:36 PM, Anil Kumar wrote:
I have observed, one erratic behavior of cp command i.e while copying
files (using *) from one directory to another directory if
we miss destination directory then cp command copies content of 1st
file into 2nd file of same source directory instead of giving any
error.

Thanks for the bug report, however, there's nothing we can
do about this in coreutils cp(1). See below.

Here is the scenario:

#ls -l
total 8
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Feb 26 17:34 ddir
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Feb 26 17:36 sdir


# echo "hello" > sdir/hello.txt
# echo "bye" > sdir/bye.txt

# cat sdir/hello.txt
hello

# cat sdir/bye.txt
bye

# cp sdir/*.txt

# cat sdir/hello.txt
bye

# cat sdir/bye.txt
bye

The point is that cp(1) does not even see the '*.txt' pattern.
Instead, the invoking shell substitutes the pattern and passes
the actual file names to 'cp'.
To get and idea what happens, you can put echo before 'cp':

  $ echo cp sdir/*.txt
  cp sdir/bye.txt sdir/hello.txt

Given the above command, cp detects that both files are regular
files, and therefore copies the content of sdir/bye.txt to
sdir/hello.txt.

BTW: this case is similar to the one explained in our FAQ:
http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/faq/coreutils-faq.html#ls-_002da-_002a-does-not-list-dot-files

As this is desired behavior, I'm tagging this issue as not a bug,
and I'm marking it as done.
If there are still open points, feel free to continue the discussion.

Have a nice day,
Berny





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