Can someone explain to me what this line means? I get the redirection part at the end, but I didn't know you could pipe to cp like that. And what is the deal with the brackets. Regex? I know what the vars 'skel' and 'home' are but i can't tell what it's doing.

And why would it give me:

Thanks!

I think I sorta get it... the "n"s are piped to cp in order to skip past all conflicts that "-i" asks about. The thing between braces looks like a fancy way of copying all files that gets around bash's weird globbing of dotfiles.

But why would it fail?

Hi,

The part between the braces is called brace expansion (a bash feature), which can generate strings. Brace expansion is performed before any other expansions and can be nested (which is true in your example).

This: {[^.],.[^.],..?} is seen by bash as 3 "expansions" (comma separated):

[^.] -> files starting with any normal character
.[^.] -> files starting with a dot followed by any normal character
..? -> files starting with 2 dots and a single normal character

The * after the {..,..,..} command tells bash it is not limited to the first one (or two) characters mentioned the the brace expansion.

I'm not sure why the command fails with a broken pipe error, it works on my linux box. Are you trying this on a linux or an OS-X box?

BTW: The -R in the command shown isn't needed. The -a (which is short for -dpR) already takes care of it.

Hope this helps.

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The pipe probably fails because the cp command fails. You may be able to find out more by running the cp command at the command prompt, replacing the variables with their known values. Alternatively it may help to echo ${skel}/{[^.],.[^.],..?}*, replacing $skel with the known value.

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