On Wed, Feb 23, 2000 at 09:29:49AM -0600, Dave Sherohman wrote: > > As for whether cp -a is The Right Thing to do, that's an occasional topic > of extended discussion. Some people prefer tar or other commands to handle > that sort of thing, but some of us use cp -a and haven't had any problems > with it. (Although ISTR that problems are possible under certain > circumstances...)
current versions of GNU cp seem to handle this pretty well, but *BSD varients of cp may not or may not even have the -a switch.. for example the Digital UNIX (yuk) cp does not have -a or -d instead it appears that cp -dpR or cp -a (GNU) are the same as Digital cp -pR (where cp -pr does not dereference links) -- Ethan Benson
