how can I copy file and no overwrite

[sammol]

I have try to see the man of cp but there are not options that to set it not overwirte any file. finally I choose to use interactive mode but it is slow. Any suggestion?

Thanks

 

[trunix]

yoy need to set the 'noclobber' option either at the command line or in your .profile

syntax varies with each shell

ksh set -o noclobber

Check your shell man page for correct syntax

 

[Required]

You might try the following.
1. Create a small script like the one below, save it as "no.sh" and set execute permission on it:

while true
do
  echo no
done

2. Use a command similar to this one: no.sh | cp -i srcfiles destdir


I cannot test this on Solaris right now, but it works on HP-UX (on HP-UX, the script is not necessary because the command "yes" can be used to do the same thing - unfortunately, I don't know if a similar command exists on Solaris).

This is somewhat dirty because you will force the answer "no" to every question. You might get unexpected results if a question different than "Overwrite (y/n)?" arises.

A better solution would be to create a script for the copy and have it verify if the destination file exists before copying.

 

[trunix]

Sorry, the noclobber option only works with redirection and not cp.

 

[grega]

In ksh, noclobber only seems to prevent re-direction to an existing file ... cp will still overwrite.

You could write your own cp script to prevent ...

#!/bin/ksh
# cp2 - prevent overwriting

[ $# != 2 ] && {
echo &quot;Usage: cp2 <source> <destination>&quot;
exit 1
}

if [ -f $2 ]
then
echo &quot;$2 exists ... cannot copy&quot;
else
cp $1 $2
fi

Greg.

 

[sammol]

Thx so much...
I will write my script