GNU bug report logs - #16889
erratic behavior of cp command i.e while copying files (using *) from one directory to another directory

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From: Bernhard Voelker <mail <at> bernhard-voelker.de>
To: Anil Kumar <linuxdeveloper7 <at> gmail.com>, 16889 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: bug#16889: erratic behavior of cp command i.e while copying files (using *) from one directory to another directory
Date: Wed, 26 Feb 2014 18:10:54 +0100

tag 16889 notabug
close 16889
thanks

On 02/26/2014 01:36 PM, Anil Kumar wrote:
> I have observed, one erratic behavior of cp command i.e while copying
> files (using *) from one directory to another directory if
> we miss destination directory then cp command copies content of 1st
> file into 2nd file of same source directory instead of giving any
> error.

Thanks for the bug report, however, there's nothing we can
do about this in coreutils cp(1). See below.

> Here is the scenario:
>
> #ls -l
> total 8
> drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Feb 26 17:34 ddir
> drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Feb 26 17:36 sdir
>
>
> # echo "hello" > sdir/hello.txt
> # echo "bye" > sdir/bye.txt
>
> # cat sdir/hello.txt
> hello
>
> # cat sdir/bye.txt
> bye
>
> # cp sdir/*.txt
>
> # cat sdir/hello.txt
> bye
>
> # cat sdir/bye.txt
> bye

The point is that cp(1) does not even see the '*.txt' pattern.
Instead, the invoking shell substitutes the pattern and passes
the actual file names to 'cp'.
To get and idea what happens, you can put echo before 'cp':

  $ echo cp sdir/*.txt
  cp sdir/bye.txt sdir/hello.txt

Given the above command, cp detects that both files are regular
files, and therefore copies the content of sdir/bye.txt to
sdir/hello.txt.

BTW: this case is similar to the one explained in our FAQ:
http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/faq/coreutils-faq.html#ls-_002da-_002a-does-not-list-dot-files

As this is desired behavior, I'm tagging this issue as not a bug,
and I'm marking it as done.
If there are still open points, feel free to continue the discussion.

Have a nice day,
Berny

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