Sorry for sending this off-list, Gord. Resending to where it ought to have gone in the first place.
On Sunday 26 January 2014 15:09:10 ghaverla wrote: > Your requirement (to skip hidden files and directories) is what is > usually required. > > But, as a generic rule, you can use the echo command to help with > analysing how the command line shell might expand a wild card. > > echo cp /path/to/src/* /path/to/dest > some_tmp_file > > If I do this on my home directory, I could a huge list as I have > too many files. Which is why I redirected the output to a file. > And looking in the file, I find that there are no hidden > directories or files copied. > > If we look at your command line, you have two switches -R and -p. > The -R turns on recursive copying, not only is every file > in .../sourcedir/A copied, every subdirectory of .../sourcedir/A, > and subdirectories of those, to the end of the file tree is copied. > The -p switch asks for the preservation of metadata: ownership, > groupship, and times. > > If you are the owner of the files under sourcedir/A and you are > also the owner of destinationdir/B, I would expect the ownership > and groupship to already be proper, and so it is only the file time > information which is being preserved. Preserve is important if > root is doing the copying. Thank you very much, Gord. Most helpful. I hadn't thought of using echo like that. I obviously need to work on my lateral thinking. :-( Lisi -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/201401261613.31575.lisi.re...@gmail.com
