> > That's the way that cp -p pretty much always works, if the -p flag is > > supported. See, for example, the GNU fileutils documentation: > > not always (I'm pretty sure that very-old implementations of -p did not > copy _all_ of the attributes, since I had work-arounds in some code for > that).
In particular symlinks. It follows symlinks instead of copying them. The GNU cp -a extension is wonderful for this since it copies symlinks as symlinks. To bad more operating systems have not picked up that option as well. However, you might be thinking of the three atime, ctime and mtime values that are stored by the filesystem for files. You can set any two, you pick, but never all three. Bob
