Second on adding an alias. I had no idea it was deprecated, and have never used -R at all... It never occurred to me to read the man page for cp.
-- Byron Grobe On Thu, Jan 2, 2020, 11:57 AM Ingo Schwarze <schwa...@usta.de> wrote: > Hi Marc, > > Marc Espie wrote on Thu, Jan 02, 2020 at 11:30:35AM +0100: > > > And if I use scp enough, I'm also likely to use cp -r by mistake. > > > > Are we likely to actually remove cp -r so the second mistake > > doesn't happen ? > > I wouldn't be opposed to that. It has been deprecated since > rev. 1.1 in 1995. FreeBSD also deprecates it but has subtly > different behaviour. NetBSD has the same deprecation notice > we have. In GNU cp(1), according to the manual, it seems to be > an alias for cp -R. Illumos and Oracle Solaris seem to somewhat > resemble FreeBSD - not sure all is identical - but -r is not > deprecated. > > Given these differences, it seems doubtful how much sense it makes > to keep it "for compatibility". > > However, deleting it would require a full make build and a ports > bulk build, i guess. > > > If it turns out it sees substantial use in the wild, i think we > should make cp -r a deprecated alias for cp -R because i expect > that almost every software out there using it (if any) probably > comes from the Linux world, given that is has been deprecated in > all BSDs for more than two decades. > > Yours, > Ingo > >
