Hi I looked this up and I still don't understand it.
I am following directions that tell me to do the following:
cp -a /usr/. /mnt/card
man cp tells me that -a means archive.
but what archive means I don't get. Also what does the . (dot) do?
Archive: don't follow symbolic links, preserve (certain) attributes, recursively copy directories. Try reading the man page a bit more carefully and you'll see the explanations there.
As for the dot, each Unix/Linux directory always has two special entries- the single dot ".", which points to the current directory, and the two dots "..", which points to the parent directory. So "/usr/." means the same as "/usr/" or "/usr" here- it does nothing at all except belabor the obvious :-)
The terminal output I get is strange as well.
cp: unable to remove `/mnt/card/./bin/[': Success cp: unable to remove `/mnt/card/./bin/w': Success
I don't understand what cp has with removing and if it can't what is Success?
Thanks Aaron
Perhaps there are files with the same name already in the target dir as in the source dir? If that is the case, cp first has to remove the target files before copying the source files. At least, that is the way I think it works. But if something prevents cp from copying (say permissions for example), it would say "unable to remove".
I don't know what "Success" means either.
-- Offer Kaye
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