> It's kind of ironic that we're arguing about the POSIX compliance of 'cp > -i' while the 'yes' command doesn't even exist in POSIX. Not really, because this is about the 'cp -i' part rather than the 'yes n'. Consider the latter an alias for ``while true; do echo n; done'' :-).
> 'pax', which is the POSIX replacement for 'cpio' and 'tar', has a -k > option for not overwriting existing files. A simple > > pax -rwk ${files} dst/ > > should do nicely. That's good to know, however it does not help anyone not already aware of the undocumented POSIX violation to avoid this gotcha.