Understanding copying package files

Question

I am seeing some unexpected results while copying package files in a shell script. There are two interrelated issues.

1. I have commands similar to the following in a shell script:

   cp -rp path/to/package/file destination/directory

The problem that I am seeing is that sometimes the package is copied as a whole, which is what I want. Other times the package "goes away" and just the contents of the package ends up in the destination/directory. I don't see the pattern which is causing this to happen differently. Specifically, in the shell script, the package is copied as a whole. But when I try the exact command from the terminal, I get only the contents.

1. In the shell script, while the package seems to be copied as a whole, it takes a very long time. Like 20 minutes to copy a 17MB file to a USB drive. When I copy the same package via Finder, it copies in about a minute. Then during testing when I rerun the script, it does not take 20 minutes, but just the minute.

These two results are unexpected. I would expect the same result each time, not varying results with the package verses package contents, and the time to run the script.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

I'm not sure about #2, but I suspect #1 is due to trailing slashes in the file path. cp -Rp /path/to/Application.app /path/to/destination will copy the entire package, while cp -Rp /path/to/Application.app/ /path/to/destination (note the trailing slash after the source) will copy just the contents.

BTW, you should use cp -R instead of cp -r -- in some implementations of cp they're the same, but in some versions the lowercase option has ... oddities. According to the man page on OS X:

COMPATIBILITY

Historic versions of the cp utility had a -r option. This implementation supports that option; however, its use is strongly discouraged, as it does not correctly copy special files, symbolic links, or fifo's.