Weird! I never noticed that. Indeed, it does! cd "$( mktemp -d )" mkdir a b c touch a/f1 a/f2 a/f3 cp -r a/ b/ ls b Resulting content of directory

Weird! I never noticed that. Indeed, it does! cd "$( mktemp -d )" mkdir a b c touch a/f1 a/f2 a/f3 cp -r a/ b/ ls b Resulting content of directory b on one my FreeBSD machines f1 f2 f3 Guess I usually 1. Don’t use cp -r so often, and 2. When I do use cp -r apparently I don’t put a trailing slash Cause I only ever had problems when trying to use rsync, not when using cp or mv :S