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Autzoo.1503 net.bugs.v7 utcsrgv!utzoo!henry Wed Mar 24 19:16:53 1982 cp misfeature The command "cp <DIRECTORY> <FILE>" will work, but does not yield a very intelligible file as a result. Most naive users don't really grasp the notion that directories are just a special kind of file, and are confused by the appearance of this strange little gibberish file. We found this a headache, and since the command seems singularly useless, we added the following code just after the assignment to "mode" in cp.c/copy():

if ((mode&S_IFMT) == S_IFDIR) { close(fold); fprintf(stderr, "cp: %s is a directory -- ignored.\n", from); return(1); }

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