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Comment by JdeBP

This is rather missing the point. The headlined article isn't really about how to achieve a goal, but about the weird history and evolution of a tool that leads us to the rather odd situation that we are in today. And it's far from being the only tool that has a weird history, that looks rather nutty if one looks at it from the point of view of a novice having to learn this stuff.

It's also not even completely covering the weird case of -r and -R for the cp command. On HP-UX, for example, the twain were different, but not in the way that they were in old GNU Core Utilities. That would be too easy. (-:

The AIX manual for cp explains its difference between -r and -R:

* https://ibm.com/docs/en/aix/7.1.0?topic=c-cp-command

Illumos also treats the two differently, but in a subtly different way:

* https://illumos.org/man/1/cp

parent JdeBP 29 days ago

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