Comments on: Supress cp “Do you want to overwrite” prompt in Fedora

By: Jeff Schroeder

Jeff Schroeder — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 14:56:01 +0000

There is a much better way and I’m surprised no one has said it yet.

The easiest way to reference the actual cp binary and skip over aliases is to use \. This is much easier than calling the full path to the binary (/bin/cp) and accomplishes the same job. It also lets you keep the alias so just in case you do something stupid you’ll have a chance to save yourself.

For example:
root@jschroeder2:~# touch file1 file2
root@jschroeder2:~# cp file1 file2
cp: overwrite `file2′? n
root@jschroeder2:~# \cp file1 file2
root@jschroeder2:~#

Perhaps I should write up a blog post on this and other common mistakes.

By: Peter Robinson

Peter Robinson — Sun, 06 Feb 2011 14:53:10 +0000

As someone mentioned above for cp you can prepend a \ to all commands to get the base command and not aliases. Its a very quick way to get around either local or system aliases.

By: Rene

Rene — Sun, 06 Feb 2011 12:11:00 +0000

You can do it using quotes like: “rm” file
or ‘rm’ file
I don’t know a manpage where this is explained. It was just one of those tricks you find on some random webpage.

By: J. Randall Owens

J. Randall Owens — Sun, 06 Feb 2011 07:00:06 +0000

Much like “No alias”‘s suggestion, I usually use /bin/cp to suppress the alias on a one-time basis.

By: Clifford

Clifford — Sun, 06 Feb 2011 03:15:48 +0000

I have not tried this with cp, but I use the full path when removing files, for example /bin/rm. I would think /bin/cp would work the same. I can not test since I don’t have an alias for cp.

By: Paul Frields

Paul Frields — Sun, 06 Feb 2011 00:04:21 +0000

“Regular users” would be using a GUI shell with its own protection settings. There’s no need for the current behavior to change.

By: valent

valent — Sat, 05 Feb 2011 23:33:49 +0000

Nope, I tried using cp -f and it looks like -i options disabled -f option. Just try it and you will see for your self.

By: No alias

No alias — Sat, 05 Feb 2011 22:00:58 +0000

Or for a onetime alias suspension use \cp instead of cp

By: dmaphy

dmaphy — Sat, 05 Feb 2011 21:25:46 +0000

If you call the commands with -f, they don’t care of the -i. In my opinion there is no need for un-setting those aliases.

By: Tweets that mention /kernel_reloaded/ -- Topsy.com

Tweets that mention /kernel_reloaded/ -- Topsy.com — Sat, 05 Feb 2011 20:53:33 +0000

[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Zuissi, Planet Fedora. Planet Fedora said: Valent Turkovic: Supress cp “Do you want to overwrite” prompt in Fedora: When you try to copy one file over ex… http://bit.ly/fNiWOB [...]