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From: kim@amdahl.amdahl.com (Kim DeVaughn)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Cp: A replacement for AmigaDos Copy
Message-ID: <7180@amdahl.amdahl.com>
Date: Mon, 25-May-87 20:39:32 EDT
Article-I.D.: amdahl.7180
Posted: Mon May 25 20:39:32 1987
Date-Received: Tue, 26-May-87 03:59:57 EDT
References: <741@van-bc.UUCP> <121@gtss.UUCP>
Organization: Amdahl Corporation,  Sunnyvale, CA 94086
Lines: 47
Keywords: AmigaDos Copy Regular Expressions

In article <121@gtss.UUCP>, chas@gtss.UUCP (Charles Cleveland) writes:
> In article <741@van-bc.UUCP> jlydiatt@van-bc.UUCP (Jeff Lydiatt) writes:
> >
> >Here is a replacement for AmigaDog "copy" program....
> >It ... has the added bonus that it retains the date of copied file.
>
> This is not a feature, it is a bug :-).  Virtually nobody does it this
> way and for good reason.  Kindly include this feature as an option only, and
> not the default one at that.

Well, this is probably one of those "religious issues", but I *strongly*
disagree with you, Charles!

It is *especially* important on floppy-based systems to retain the "last
modified" date of a file when it is copied from one floppy to another,
*as the default*.

Without such date retention, it can become quite difficult to figure-out just
which "incarnation" of a set of files (i.e., directory of files) is really the
oldest, newest, etc.  And of course, many processing programs (such as "make",
and various archiving/backup programs) rely on the modification date to guide
their processing.

It may interest you to know that the MS-DOS and PC-DOS "copy" command retains
the file date [I'd hardly call Microsoft and IBM "virtually nobody"], and many
UNIX(R) utilities go to the trouble of preserving/restoring it (e.g., tar,
pack, compress, etc.), as do archivers like ARC, PKARC, etc.

Maybe I'm overlooking something obvious, but I sure can't come up with the
"good reason" you alluded to for not retaining the date on a pure copy
operation.  If you *do* want the file to have the current date, there is
is always "touch" ... :-)!

Anyway, thanks to Jeff for posting the new copy, with file-dating working
the way it should have in the first place!  Now, about the way AmigaDOS
(nee' Tripos) does pattern matching ...

/kim



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