Re: Short circuit cp -l

[christos%zoulas.com@localhost (Christos Zoulas)]

On Jul 18,  1:11pm, kre%munnari.OZ.AU@localhost (Robert Elz) wrote:
-- Subject: Re: Short circuit cp -l

|     Date:        Tue, 17 Jul 2018 09:06:53 -0400
|     From:        "D'Arcy Cain" <darcy%NetBSD.org@localhost>
|     Message-ID:  <409f3df1-c91c-897c-e4ea-98413263f68a%NetBSD.org@localhost>
| 
|   | Do you think that this is a candidate for a pullup to 8?
| 
| You've already been informed that it is too late for 8.0 (and I don't think 
| that is the kind of change that is suitable for 8.0.1 - but it might be for
| 8.1)
| 
| You do understand though that you have changed the semantics?  The
| old way, cp -l would only link the files that could have been copied, now
| it will happily link unreadable files.   Also cp -il will no longer work, and
| probably more.
| 
| With this change, I don't really know why the option needs to exist at
| all, cp -l seems to be just a defective implementation of ln -f .. I'd be 
| inclined to simply delete the -l option (or simply exec "ln" when the -l
| option is given to cp, if there is some good reason for having a -l option).

Well, in that case we should check what POSIX says about it and what do
other implementations do, and perhaps revert it if we are the only ones
doing something different.

christos