Re: Bad cp -a behaviour

[Paul Eggert]

Andreas Schwab <address@hidden> writes:

> Tim Waugh <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> The problem seems to be that when a destination file is written it is
>> done so by opening the file without removing it first.  If it is a
>> hardlink to a previous destination file from the same command it will
>> be overwritten.
>
> This is required by POSIX.

POSIX doesn't specify the behavior of "cp -a", so it can't require the
current coreutils behavior.  It's quite possible that we need to
change the behavior of "cp -a" to make it more useful for its intended
purpose of making archives.

However, I don't understand what the undesired behavior is.
(Like Philip Rowlands, I can't access the original bug report.)