On 19/10/2007, at 8:12 PM, Raimo Niskanen wrote:
On Thu, Oct 18, 2007 at 10:06:42PM +1300, Richard Toohey wrote:
JUST FOR FUN I have tried to "fix" this. What I know about C code
can be written on the back of a postage stamp
Did I mention the SIZE of the postage stamp? It's rather small ... 8-)
I am afraid solving the general case is harder.
The path length limit actually works as a crude, cheep and effective
cycle detection.
While Windows Finder solves the simple case of copying into
yourself, I do not think it has solved the general case.
Anyone curious to try?
Runs screaming into the night ... A lot more man reading for me, first!
--
/ Raimo Niskanen, Erlang/OTP, Ericsson AB
I might try a Linux install (got some Slackware 12.0 CDs) and look at
what it does (and its source code) - sure someone will beat me to it.
Looks like OpenBSD, FreeBSD, and Mac OS X BSD bits have the same
sort of outcome.
I got this from Tom Van Looy (thanks, Tom):
Copy foo to foo only once and quit, I think that's the correct
behaviour. I even think that posix more or less describes that.
$ mkdir foo
$ cp -R foo foo
$ ls -R foo
foo/:
foo
foo/foo:
That's what it should be doing I guess. But it's tricky, if you start
doing symlinks etc, you'll end up looping sooner or later. What if
the directoy's are not named the same (eg: hard links)?
(please reply cc to the list)
And another email from Tom Van Looy:
Oh and yes, it doesn't go boom, the copy just stops when the max
filename length is reached (logically). And "<blablabla> name too
long (not copied)" is an error, you can just redirect it to dev null,
cp -R foo foo 2>/dev/null, if you don't like it on your screen.
Try fixing it so that it doesn't copy a directory into itself when it
is allready copied (so allow it only once). GNU cp does something
like that:
$ mkdir foo
$ cp -R foo foo
cp: cannot copy a directory, `foo', into itself, `foo/foo'
$ ls -R foo
foo:
foo
foo/foo:
Only, I think the warning is not needed (and I didn't further test
it, so it's possibly doing something else after all).
