Order of files with 'cp'

Tim Kientzle kientzle at freebsd.org
Sat Nov 19 11:33:56 PST 2005


Brian Candler wrote:
> I've noticed on FreeBSD-5.4 and -6.0 that the order in which 'cp' copies
> multiple files does not match the order they're given on the command line.
...
> I've had a look through the code, and it seems that cp calls fts_open() with
> the list of files in argv; fts_open then does a qsort() on the arguments,
> using the comparison function mastercmp() provided by cp:

My suggestion:  Have 'cp' call fts_open once for each
command-line argument, instead of giving fts_open the entire
argv list to muck with.

Requires faking up an argv array for each single item,
but that will be a lot easier than trying to fix fts.

Tim



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