Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!apple!excelan!unix!hplabs!hpfcso!hpfcmgw!hpfcse!hpuecoa!speclab!rclark
From: rclark@speclab.bgp-usgs.gov (Roger N. Clark)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.hp
Subject: cp gives poor error message (so what else is new?)
Message-ID: <210038@speclab.bgp-usgs.gov>
Date: 27 Nov 89 18:11:56 GMT
Organization: U.S. Geological Survey, Branch of Geophysics, Denver
Lines: 19

A user recently complained about a cryptic error message in unix (so
what else is new?).  He did something like:

          cp mydir/* /d36

Well, cp comes back with:

          Usage: cp f1 f2
                 cp [-r] f1 ... fn d1

He was using it correctly but /d36 didn't exist.  The message should
have been something like: "ERROR: destination directory does not exist."

A sun gave a similar usage message so this seems to be generic unix.
Could someone in the Unix standards area see if cp could be changed
to give reasonable error messages.  How about the rest of Unix?

Roger N. Clark
..!speclab!rclark