cp and "are the same file"

[Robert R Schneck-McConnell]

Jeremy C. Reed wrote:
> Anyways, I want to cp to magically see the .exe and copy correctly.
>
> Example of error:
>
>  cp: `/home/jreed/tmp/bmake/bmake' and `/home/jreed/pkg/bin/bmake' are the
>  same file
>
> "are the same file" is the wrong message.

This won't be fixed until someone volunteers to maintain coreutils.

However, in the fileutils source tarball there are three files:
  copy.c  copy.c.cgf  copy.c.orig

If you replace "copy.c" with either of the other two and rebuild, you 
get a "cp" which does have special handling for the .exe extension.

Apparently, it was felt that it was too dangerous to have "cp" behave 
this way by default.  For instance, someone could really want to copy 
"foo" to "bar", and end up overwriting "bar.exe" because only "foo.exe" 
existed.  This is pretty far-fetched, I think.

Robert


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