I find it annoying that explicitly answering "y" to an interactive prompt in cp can get ignored:
$ touch foo $ chmod 444 foo $ cp -i /etc/issue foo cp: try to overwrite 'foo', overriding mode 0444 (r--r--r--)? y cp: cannot create regular file 'foo': Permission denied It seems to me, in terms of UI, that this is clearly at least as "forceful" (I would say more so) than -f, which does do the overwrite. Also, both mv -i and rm -i already perform their action on a readonly file when told "y"es. So simple consistency is another argument that cp should do the same. Jim told me once that this behavior is specified by POSIX. Hardly surprising. Can we DTRT here by default and reserve the stupid behavior for POSIXLY_CORRECT? Curmudgeonly, Karl
