This is a strange and hopefully not too newbie question (I've asked my linux gurus and they actually cannot find an answer for me!)

I used to have a really effective cron job that copied data from one drive to another using the following code:

Now, I'm being told that --reply=no is deprecated. I can't figure out what I can use to replace this.

Basically, here's my pseudocode of what I'm looking for:

"copy recursively each subdirectory in dir1/* to dir2, and if the file exists in dir2, don't overwrite."

cp -f doesn't do it, and for whatever reason, it's always interactive. I am trying to avoid having to hit n n n n n n n n and having the same results as I once achieved with the deprecated --reply=no.

What's the new format that would work for me here?

Thanks.

its a hack but if you want n n n n n n n
then will do it for you
also check for aliases just run it might not be running cp directly.

I was sure there was an environment var to set but I can not find it.

You could use

yes n | cp -ri dir1/* dir2/ --

or

cp -ri dir1/* dir2/ -- < <(yes n)

or

cp -ri dir1/* dir2/ < <(! :) 2>/dev/null

That gets so complicated. I wish they didn't deprecate a rather useful command. Thanks for the tips.

I agree, I don't understand why they would drop it.