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cpjustopened the destination withO_CREAT | O_TRUNCand performed aread/writeloop; sure, with moderncpthere are so many knobs that it basically has to try tostatthe destination beforehand, and could easily check for existence first (and does withcp -i/cp -n), but if the expectations were established from original, bare bonescptools, changing that behavior would break existing scripts needlessly. It's not like modern shells withaliascan't just makecp -ithe default for interactive use after all.creathappens to be equivalent toopen+O_CREAT | O_TRUNC), but the lack ofO_EXCLdoes explain why it wouldn't have been so easy to handle existing files; trying to do so would be inherently racy (you'd basically have toopen/statto check existence, then usecreat, but on large shared systems, it's always possible by the time you got tocreat, someone else made the file and now you've blown it away anyway). May as well just overwrite unconditionally.