cp -Tr overwrite behavior

Question

I'm using GNU coreutils

I have a directory foo containing a file file1 and a directory bar containing file2.

If I now do a cp -rT foo bar, bar will contain both files instead of getting overwriten like the manpage might lead you to believe.

I'd like for ´bar´ only to contain the contents of ´foo´ and not get merged.

Answer 1

With GNU cp, the -T option is used to ensure that the source directory will not be put inside the target directory. It will not cause to contents of the target directory to be removed.

The info documentation on this (info '(coreutils)Target directory') says (it's using mv as an example):

-T

--no-target-directory

Do not treat the last operand specially when it is a directory or a symbolic link to a directory. This can help avoid race conditions in programs that operate in a shared area. For example, when the command mv /tmp/source /tmp/dest succeeds, there is no guarantee that /tmp/source was renamed to /tmp/dest: it could have been renamed to /tmp/dest/source instead, if some other process created /tmp/dest as a directory. However, if mv -T /tmp/source /tmp/dest succeeds, there is no question that /tmp/source was renamed to /tmp/dest.

Note that mv -T source dest will fail if dest is not empty.

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To replace the contents of bar with that of foo in your example, use

rm -rf bar
cp -r foo bar

or,

rsync --archive --delete foo/ bar