Re: Use of "cp -a" in configure not very portable

[Jim Meyering]

Thanks for the report.
That was left over from when I was debugging part of autoconf.
It should not have made it into fileutils' configure script.
It won't happen again.

Jens Schleusener <address@hidden> wrote:
| Hello,
|
| I just tried to configure and compile fileutils-4.0.39 under AIX 4.1.4
| and got a small error (fileutils-4.0.36 hasn't that problem):
|
|  ./configure --prefix=/usr/local/contrib --disable-nls \
|             --program-prefix=gnu
|
|  cp: illegal option -- a
|  Usage: cp [-fhip] [-r|-R] [--] src target
|     or: cp [-fhip] [-r|-R] [--] src1 ... srcN directory
|  checking build system type... rs6000-ibm-aix4.1.4.0
|  checking host system type... rs6000-ibm-aix4.1.4.0
|  (... lines deleted)
|
| The reason seems to be the following code in configure
|
|  echo "#! $SHELL" >conftest.sh
|  echo  "exit 0"   >>conftest.sh
|        cp -a conftest.sh /tmp
|  chmod +x conftest.sh
|
| The option "-a" seems to me not very portable (GNU cp specific?).