[PATCH] adding two new options to 'cp'

[Garance A Drosehn]

At 7:17 PM -0500 8/1/06, Rick C. Petty wrote:
>On Tue, Aug 01, 2006 at 08:09:08PM -0400, Garance A Drosehn wrote:
>>
>>  I had understood this option as a request to "copy all the
>>  existing holes", which is not the same thing.  I.e., I
>>  thought we wanted `cp' to create the new file such that it
>>  would take up exactly the same number of disk blocks, and
>>  have the same number of holes (in exactly the same places)
>>  as the original file.
>
>Which it currently doesn't, without any sparse option.

Yes, but we know it doesn't, and we don't expect it to.

I *thought* what this thread was asking was for someone
to add some new option to `cp', where that new option
would do the above.  But I was wrong with that, and
apparently people would be happy with a new option which
says "sparse-ify the file".

>  > I agree that "sparse-ify" should be easy to implement, and
>>  could be useful.  I'm not fond of the idea, but I can see
>>  how people might want it.  I do would not like it, because
>>  the user will have to know whether it is appropriate to use
>>  on a file-by-file basis.  You can't just 'cp -rp' an entire
>>  directory, and feel confident that the "Right Thing(TM)"
>>  will happen for each file that is being copied.  So, if I
>>  am copying directories, I'll still have to resort to some
>>  other tool to get the job done "Right(TM)".
>
>I don't see why not.

I don't care if you don't see it.  I am just stating
my personal opinion, and apparently I am not even
doing a good job at that.  I will stop now.