directory copying with cp; broken?

[Richard A. O'Keefe]

In article <10073 at yavin.uucp> mike_s at sun.UUCP (Mike Sullivan) writes:
>In article <506 at quintus.UUCP> ok at quintus.UUCP I wrote:
>>Are you sure about that?  In both SunOS 3.2 and SunOS 4.0,
>>	% cat .
>>	cat: read error: Is a directory
>I am running SunOS 4.0, and if I 'cat .' I get the contents of the
>directory (file names, etc.), not a read error. "wc ." also works.

I did actually _test_ my statement, but it never occurred to me to try
it on a file server.  Apparently directories in an "nfs"-mounted file
system look empty, but directories in a "4.2"-mounted file system can
still be read.