Hello Everyone,

I am trying to see the main difference between cp -a and cp -p. The man pages are a bit confusing to me.

I tested those two commands on my ubuntu system as root and it feels like the end result is the same.

It seems like both cp -a and cp -p preserve the original file permissions, owners and groups and timestamps. I am not sure if I am missing something.

Do you have experience with those two commands?

Thanks

As per the manual page the -a option is a superset of the -p option.

The -p is the same as --preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps

The -a is the same as --preserve=all --no-dereference --recursive

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Did you give the archive a nameman?

I ran cp -a Folder1/* Folder2/ and cp -p Folder1/* Folder2/
It seems like in both cases, all files were copied from Folder1 to Folder2 while preserving their original permissions , owners and groups and timestamps. I was not able to see the difference with both commands

As posted -a = --preserve=all --no-dereference --recursive
--perserve=all -> all = mode,ownership,timestamps and if possible additional attributes: context, links, xattr

-p == --preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps

With respect to the output of the ls command there should be no difference between attributes of the two files. If you want to see the extended attributes for the files you can use the getxattr command.

With -a you also have the additional options
-d same as --no-dereference --preserve=links

Which means copy symbolic links as symbolic links rather than copying the files that they point to, and preserve hard links between source files in the copies. If the folders do not contain links then you are not going to see a difference.

1 members found this post helpful.

thank you for the very detailed response michaelk. I appreciate it. I am still new to Linux and and learning everyday.

I now see that the cp -a is a better option as it preserves all attributes of the original file.

Thanks again for your help

However, it does that at the cost of adding a --recursive option. You might not always want a recursive copy. If you want to preserve all the attributes of the original file, then you can use either the shortcut --perserve=all or else the full list --preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps,context,links,xattr plus --no-dereference