this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2024
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[โ€“] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Aha! I didn't get that you meant the issue was accidentally using -r instead of -R since both you and OP wrote the upper case one.

I'm a lot more used to -R so I instead get caught off by commands where that means something other than recursive :)

I mostly use symbolic mode and honestly don't get why everyone else seems to use octal all the time.

[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

People probably confuse it with tools like cp, rm, ls, etc as they use -r for file recursion.

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

ls -r actually lists entries in reverse order! It needs -R as well.

cp and rm accept either.

Looking at some man pages the only commands I found where -R didn't work were scp and gzip where it doesn't do anything, and rsync where it's "use relative path names".

(Caveat: BSD utils might be different, who knows what those devils get up to!)