On 2019/05/23 22:58, Ingo Schwarze wrote: > Hi Tracey, > > Tracey Emery wrote on Thu, May 23, 2019 at 02:35:10PM -0600: > > > Attached is a proposed diff for cp(1). It adds the -l (hard link) > > and -s (symlink) options. > > I don't like that. That's exactly what can be done with ln(1) in a > standard way. There is no value in making every tool do everything - > quite to that contrary, that only causes gratuitous complication and > confusion.
It can be done, but I think the main point of this cp(1) option is that it works with -r. You can also do that with a combination of ln(1) and find(1), but it's more awkward, and there's potentially a lot of fork overhead if copying a deep tree. > > These options are available in GNU cp, FreeBSD cp, > > and the -l option is at least in NetBSD and Dragonfly. > > > > I needed the -l option to use the system cp for rsnapshots, instead of > > their native_cl_al function. Hopefully, this will speed up my backups. > > If the rsnapshots uses such options, i think you should send patches > to the rsnapshots project instead. Tell them to use POSIX features > instead of relying on pointless GNUisms. I don't use rsnapshot but from a quick glance it appears to be a non- default option that they only suggest using on Linux. (Rather than modifying /bin/cp, an alternative would be to install coreutils and point it at gcp).
