site_archiver@lists.apple.com Delivered-To: Darwin-dev@lists.apple.com Ok, thanks. _______________________________________________ Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored. Darwin-dev mailing list (Darwin-dev@lists.apple.com) Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/darwin-dev/site_archiver%40lists.appl... Kevin Van Vechten wrote:

Eric Gorr wrote:

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Is this the right place for this question?

Yes.

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Under 10.4.10, when executing cp -n, cp would return an exit

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status of 0 if the file you told it to copy existed or not.

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Under 10.5, cp will return an exit status of 1 if the file

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already exists and one uses the -n option.

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I was just wondering if:

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1. 10.4.10 had a bug

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2. 10.5 has a bug

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3. the definition of how the -n option is supposed to work

has changed

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It seems strange that cp would return an exit status of 1 now if

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the file already exists. After all, the command will do exactly what

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it is supposed to do and not copy the file.

I suppose it was #3. It looks like the exit status was changed due to

feedback that returning a zero exit status gives no way to determine

whether or not a file was actually copied (<rdar://problem/3624563>).

This is a divergence from the FreeBSD behavior in 10.4.10 (FreeBSD

introduced the non-standard -n flag). Because -n is non-standard[1],

I'd recommend against using it. Still seems strange that it would be considered an error if the command does what it is told to do. This email sent to site_archiver@lists.apple.com