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Faisal Vali
Asked: 2010-03-07 07:57:49 +0800 CST

Turning off cp (copy) command's interactive mode (cp : overwrite ?)

  • 772

Does anyone know how I would turn off the interactive mode when using cp?

I am trying to copy a directory recursively into another and for each file that is getting overwritten I have to answer 'y'.

The command I am using is:

cp -r /usr/share/drupal-update/* /usr/share/drupal

But I get asked to confirm each overwrite:

cp: overwrite `./CHANGELOG.txt'? y  
cp: overwrite `./COPYRIGHT.txt'? y  
cp: overwrite `./INSTALL.mysql.txt'? y  
cp: overwrite `./INSTALL.pgsql.txt'? y  
...

I am using ubuntu server version jaunty.
Thanks!

linux ubuntu ubuntu-9.04 copy cp

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Execute:

    alias cp

    To see if cp has been aliased to cp -i

    In that case run: 

    \cp -r /usr/share/drupal-update/* /usr/share/drupal

    to ignore the alias

    • 49

  2. cp -f will not ask for confirmation (that's force) So do 

    cp -fr /usr/share/drupal-update/* /usr/share/drupal
    • 3

  3. Yea the reason for cp command to be interactive because in many common shells by default copy comes with alias as cp -i this can be found by running command as follows :

    alias cp

    output will be

    alias cp='cp -i'

    There are different ways to solve it. Solutions are :

    Solution 1. Set alias for that session/permanently in the system or offload alias for cp command.

    unset alias: will remove alias for that command. unalias cp

    or

    resetting alias:

    alias cp='cp'

    the above command will set alias for cp to be just cp itself instead of cp -i. So you can run copy commands as many as you want without interactive mode just for that terminal session only(temporary). To make that permanent you may reset alias in respective files say

    Bash – ~/.bashrc
ZSH – ~/.zshrc
Fish – ~/.config/fish/config.fish

    Solution 2. Run with cp command with a backslash \ at the beginning of the copy command.

    \cp foo.log /tmp/

    This will effectively ignores the alias for the cp command just for that command only.

    Inference: Solution 1 is good to set it temporary or permanent if you intend to run lot of cp commands and you want to turn off the interactive mode.

    Solution2 is good if you only have couple of cp commands only and don't want to reset the alias, this will be good.

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