Subject: bug#8381: cp inconsistency

From: Thomas Hofmann <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 30 Mar 2011 13:56:08 +0200

Hello,

two issues:
1) manpage of cp contains obsolete email-address for bug-reporting
2) cp inconsistency when copying a directory to a) a non existing
directory, or b) to an existing directory. Further elaborated below.

cp -a SOME_DIR NOT_YET_EXISTING_DIR

results in a new directory directly containing each entry of SOME_DIR

while:
CP -a SOME_DIR EXISTING_DIR

results in EXISTING_DIR/SOME_DIR

The first result seems to be a reasonable outcome in both cases.
Appending "/" to the directory-names should lead to the same result.
While appending "/." to the target-directory would change the meaning,
and rather lead to the result of the observed second version.

Kind regards,
Thomas

p.s. cp (GNU coreutils) 7.1