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

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