alt Hacker NewsThirteen years ago I asked the same question:
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/82485/when-wouldnt-...
It seems that recursive by default would have been much more intuitive.
Thirteen years ago I asked the same question:
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/82485/when-wouldnt-...
It seems that recursive by default would have been much more intuitive.
It's rather sad that none of the answers were that the cp command simply did not gain a recursive option until the 1980s, well into the 1980s if you were on one side of the Unix wars.
Yes, seriously. When you read about the supposed evils of cat -v from the Unix nostalgia people, remember that it was the same people who gave cat its -v option who also gave cp its -r option, in 4.2BSD.
It took over half a decade to percolate out of the BSD world, too. AT&T Unix System 5 did not have an -r option to cp. Here's Brandon S. Allbery explaining in 1987 how one copies directories on AT&T Unix System 5 Releases 2/3 by combining find and cpio -p:
* https://groups.google.com/g/comp.unix.questions/c/XiumTgkcYR...
Originally we read directories as raw byte streams and liked it, you know. (-: