Re: Adding -l option to cp

[Simon Burge <simonb%NetBSD.org@localhost>]

David Laight wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 23, 2011 at 11:46:37AM +0100, Bernd Ernesti wrote:
> > On Sat, Jan 22, 2011 at 05:44:19PM -0500, D'Arcy J.M. Cain wrote:
> > > I find the -l option in FreeBSD extremely usefule and find myself
> > > installing coreutils on NetBSD just to get the GNU cp.  It would be
> > > nice to add this to NetBSD.  Would anyone object if I applied the
> > > following patch?
> > 
> > Yes I will.
> > 
> > I think we should keep the standard tools alone with there supported
> > options and not add non standard options to them.
> > 
> > There are other options to keep the hard links when you copy files.
> > e.g. rsync
> 
> Doesn't rsync copy a tree including its hard links, whereas the patch
> uses hard links instead of doing copies ??

rsync has the --link-dest option which at a glace appears to be similar
to what cp -l does.  I'm not sure though that it's the same thing as
I think you're asking about (preserving hard links within a tree when
copied?).

Cheers,
Simon.