i've been under the mistaken assumption that the -n/--no-clobber option exits non-zero when the target exists, but someone pointed out to me recently that it silently ignores existing files. can we get a setting to control this ? basically i've been writing things like: if ! cp -n foo bar; then ... error out because bar already exists, or otherwise failed ... fi when really i need to write: if [ -e bar ] || ! cp foo bar; then ... error out ... fi -mike