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Diffstat (limited to 'doc/coreutils.texi')
| -rw-r--r-- | doc/coreutils.texi | 18 |
1 files changed, 13 insertions, 5 deletions
diff --git a/doc/coreutils.texi b/doc/coreutils.texi index 4d17ed18b..0b5a3d341 100644 --- a/doc/coreutils.texi +++ b/doc/coreutils.texi @@ -7614,12 +7614,11 @@ implementations that dereference symbolic links by default. @cindex COW @cindex clone @cindex copy on write -Perform a lightweight, copy-on-write (COW) copy. -Copying with this option can succeed only on some file systems. -Once it has succeeded, beware that the source and destination files -share the same disk data blocks as long as they remain unmodified. +Perform a lightweight, copy-on-write (COW) copy, if supported by the +file system. Once it has succeeded, beware that the source and destination +files share the same disk data blocks as long as they remain unmodified. Thus, if a disk I/O error affects data blocks of one of the files, -the other suffers the exact same fate. +the other suffers the same fate. The @var{when} value can be one of the following: @@ -7633,6 +7632,15 @@ If the copy-on-write operation is not supported then fall back to the standard copy behaviour. @end table +This option is overridden by the @option{--link}, @option{--symbolic-link} +and @option{--attributes-only} options, thus allowing it to be used +to configure the default data copying behavior for @command{cp}. +For example, with the following alias, @command{cp} will use the +minimum amount of space supported by the file system. + +@example +alias cp='cp --reflink=auto --sparse=always' +@end example @item --remove-destination @opindex --remove-destination |