On Wed, 26 Jan 2005, Mikey wrote:

> On Wednesday 26 January 2005 12:52, todd hewett wrote:
> > cp -- X -X works as well as cp X ./-X
> >
> > Of interesting note on Mac OSX cp X '-X' worked fine.

The BSD cp(1) and the coreutils cp(1) have different behaviour with
command-line argument parsing.

> Of the above mentioned only cp X ./-X worked. Why is that? Is that how the
> escape character works; only with the period? I am confused!

No escape in that example. The . (dot) simply means current directory, so
copy X to the file named "-X" in the current directory.

ls .

cd .

ls -ld .


 Jeremy C. Reed

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