-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 According to Werner Adler on 9/11/2006 5:14 AM: > Hello, > > I don't know, if this is a bug or just the misuse of a feature: > > if I have two files with the same ending (could be any part of the > name), say 1.test and 2.test, and I want to copy both files to a > directory, but accidently type "return" before entering the directory name: > > cp *.test > > the second file is overwritten by the first file (I expected to get an > error message and was pretty surprised about that behaviour). (Funny) > Feature or bug?
Feature required by POSIX. The shell expands wildcards before passing arguments to cp, so all cp sees is "cp 1.test 2.test", and it has no way of knowing whether you meant to overwrite 2.test or had a wildcard typo. Aliasing cp to 'cp -i' can catch this, but may prove annoying for other situations. Another idea, relying on GNU features, would be getting in the habit of 'cp --target-directory=. *.test"; by explicitly specifying the target directory with an option, you no longer have to worry about whether the wildcard expanded to exactly two filenames, or expanded to multiple filenames the last of which was a directory. Or you can also experiment with the backup features, so that if this does happen to you, you would at least still be able to retrieve 2.test from its backup name. - -- Life is short - so eat dessert first! Eric Blake [EMAIL PROTECTED] -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.2.1 (Cygwin) Comment: Public key at home.comcast.net/~ericblake/eblake.gpg Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFFBVT184KuGfSFAYARAhS2AKCgDjInwfnUWHkj6L+fiimucZWtbACgsJq5 CB0qQmFlqKnb8Z0+oyb9T8A= =92N6 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ Bug-coreutils mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-coreutils
