Subject: bug#10055: [sr #107875] BUG cp -u corrupts 'fs'' information if interupted; can't recover on future invoctions

From: "Linda A. Walsh" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 15 Nov 2011 14:18:14 -0800

Paul Eggert wrote:

On 11/15/11 12:46, Linda A. Walsh wrote:

Better than leaving *doo doo* in a file

Sometimes, but not always. I can think of plausible cases where I'd
rather have a partial copy than no copy at all. As an extreme example,
if I'm doing 'cp /dev/tty A', I do not want A removed on interrupt
even if A has already been truncated and overwritten,
as A contains the only copy of the data that I just typed in by hand.

But we could add an option to 'cp' to have this behavior.
Perhaps --remove-destination=signal? That is --remove-destination
could have an optional list of names of places where the destination
could be removed, where the default is not to remove it, and
plain --remove-destination means --remove-destination=before.

----
I think you misunderstood the problem.

Perhaps I did. But could you explain the problem then? For example,
how would the proposed "cp --remove-destination=signal A B"
not address the problem?