Re: wildcard feature?

[Philip Rowlands]

On Mon, 11 Sep 2006, Werner Adler wrote:

> if I have two files with the same ending (could be any part of the 
> name), say 1.test and 2.test, and I want to copy both files to a 
> directory, but accidently type "return" before entering the directory 
> name:
>
> cp *.test
>
> the second file is overwritten by the first file (I expected to get an 
> error message and was pretty surprised about that behaviour). (Funny) 
> Feature or bug?

Feature. cp doesn't actually see that you used a wildcard, as the shell 
has already expanded it. Try "echo cp *.test" to see what arguments cp 
gets passed.

cp does have an --interactive (-i) flag available which will cause it to 
prompt the user before overwriting any files. Some distributions choose 
to make a shell alias for rm, mv, and cp to include this flag for the 
root user, to prevent catastrophic damage from a typo.


Cheers,
Phil