Re: Autoconf 2.52g is released

[Thomas Dickey]

On Sun, Jan 27, 2002 at 11:47:02AM -0700, Bob Proulx wrote:
> > > That's the way that cp -p pretty much always works, if the -p flag is
> > > supported.  See, for example, the GNU fileutils documentation:
> > 
> > not always (I'm pretty sure that very-old implementations of -p did not
> > copy _all_ of the attributes, since I had work-arounds in some code for
> > that).
> 
> In particular symlinks.  It follows symlinks instead of copying them.

I don't see it in my rcs logs, but I seem to recall that "cp -p" would
copy timestamps but not protection modes on Apollo SR9.something.

> The GNU cp -a extension is wonderful for this since it copies symlinks
> as symlinks.  To bad more operating systems have not picked up that
> option as well.

tar works too... (but I've found it generally more useful to copy symlinks
as symlinks than the targets).
 
> However, you might be thinking of the three atime, ctime and mtime
> values that are stored by the filesystem for files.  You can set any
> two, you pick, but never all three.

actually I'm well aware of the distinction.  I use my own copy utility,
which I wrote back when I first encountered "cp -r" on a BSD system
in the 80's.  (It had an unfortunate habit of dumping core, and wasn't
implemented on Apollo anyway).

-- 
Thomas E. Dickey <address@hidden>
http://invisible-island.net
ftp://invisible-island.net