directory copying with cp; broken?

[Wayne Mesard]

Note Followup-To.

>From article <40 at ausonics.OZ>, by greyham at ausonics.OZ (Greyham Stoney):
> in article <8540 at smoke.ARPA>, gwyn at smoke.ARPA (Doug Gwyn ) says:
>> "cp" is not changing anything; it's making a copy of the contents of a
>> file.  It wouldn't be safe for that to be turned into an actual
>> directory since at least the "." entry in it would be incorrect.
> 
> Minor semantic point. Come on, you know what I was getting at. No, I wasn't
> proposing it should create a directory, but rather that it made more sense to
> reject the copy (or just copy the directory contents and do away with the -r
> flag). Just depends on how you look at it I guess.
> 				Greyham

Indeed.  And more generally, a consistent way of handling directories
(i.e. directory files) needs to be established.  In SunOS 3.4:

  cp <dir> <fn>             ==>  "cp: <dir>: Is a directory (not copied).
  head, tail, cat <dir>     ==>  {works}
  more <dir>                ==>  "*** <dir>: directory ***"

My preference is for cp to do the right thing (i.e, nix the -r flag) and
for cat, head and tail (and any other file display* programs) to behave
as more(1) does, with the addition of a new option to cat(1) to
explicitly tell it to treat a directory as an ordinary file.

But that's just one opinion.

* It would be silly to remove functionality from file _processing_
  programs such as wc.

-- 
void *Wayne_Mesard();         MESARD at BBN.COM         BBN, Cambridge, MA