My basic problem is that when I am doing a "mass copy" - that is copying a
large directory
structure from one place to another, most of the time I want behavior #1 from
the list
below, but, occasionally, I want behavior #2.
1) If the original directory is, say, /foo/bar/beezle and my current directory
is
/home/wow, then I want the contents of /foo/bar/beezle to be copied into
/home/wow. E.g.,
if there is a file called /foo/bar/beezle/zowie, the new file will be:
/home/wow/zowie.
2) Same setup as before, now I want it to create a new directory "beezle" under
/home/wow
and then put all the copied stuff there. So, in the example above, the new
file would be:
/home/wow/beezle/zowie.
Now, the two programs that I use to do these sorts of copies are "cp" and
"rsync". I'm
pretty sure that "rsync" does one thing if you do something like:
$ rsync -avxH /foo/bar/beezle .
And the other if you do:
$ rsync -avxH /foo/bar/beezle/ .
But I can never remember which is which, so I usually end up trial-and-erroring
it until I
get it right.
But, here's the thing, "cp" (with -a) seems to do the same thing with either
syntax, which
is behavior #2 from the above list (which is usually, IME, the wrong thing).
Interestingly, after a little bit of trial-and-error, I found that:
$ cp -a /foo/bar/beezle/. .
does the right thing. But it seems like there should be a cleaner solution.
Is there?
Note, incidentally, that another method would be:
$ cp -a /foo/bar/beezle/* .
But that would miss the "dot files", wouldn't it?
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