On Jan 26,  1:52pm, Chief Anarchic Officer wrote:
} Subject: Re: Recursive grep
} 'diff -r' is stretching it a bit, history or no, but the -R option
} is probably there for performance reasons.  (I never use it.)

'diff -r' would be really hard to put together from existing tools.
I've never run across a version of diff that has a -R option.

} 'cp -r' is almost an aberration.  If it's going to do a recursive
} copy, the least it can do is attempt to recreate symlinks (I haven't seen
} a man page for cp in about five years, and the last time I ran 'cp -r',
} it followed symlinks and filled my filesystem but quick, so I never
} use that one anymore, either).

Yup, 'cp -r' is pretty worthless.  The -a option on GNU cp does pretty
much the right thing.  My only grip is that it tries to chown() the target
even if you're not root.  This screws up if the target is on a filesystem
that is NFS mounted from a machine that allows anyone to chown() files, and
the directory that you just gave away is no longer writeable by you.