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. Gord -- 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/20140126080910.208c8f5e@newmain.materia
