I am sending this answer to the list again, because it was my initial mistake that I sent the first copy of my last message to your address instead of to the list.
Sorry, Denys, I was never talking about the scenario you are mentioning, really just about overwriting an existing character device by a regular file, so it gets its contents. No more, no less. And I still insist that it is fair to expect that this will work. I am not talking about copying a device onto something else and not about copying recursively either. Only this: cp /regular/file /character/device Without unlinking the device before copying the source file into it. It is so straightforward it almost hurts. ;-) Why on earth should this not work by default (without tweaking the source code)? Denys Vlasenko: > On Tuesday 11 September 2007 18:12, Alexander Kriegisch wrote: >>> I'm not sure there are users which really need >>> "cp -r dir1 dir2" to follow pre-existing dir2/dir1/xxx >>> symlinks. >> I am not, either. I just need regular files overwriting devices by not >> unlinking them first (resulting in them being gone and recreated in a >> wrong fashion), because it is what can be expected not only by >> Coreutils, but also by BusyBox. Be it with or without a switch, to me it >> seems this should be default behaviour. There is just no point in >> replacing a device by a regular file. > > When you do recursive directory copy, you obviously > want to have *a copy of the directory*, not anything else. > > Just think for a second what "cp -r /a/dev /" can do > if you have /a/dev/hda. > > I was burned by it more than once, when I have several trees > of symlinks to files, and I accidentally modify original file > because cp "writes through the symlink" instead of replacing it. > Not as tragic as catting a file into /dev/hda, > but still annoying. _______________________________________________ busybox mailing list busybox@busybox.net http://busybox.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/busybox
