OT (ish): How to copy hidden files/directories

[Rick Stevens]

Angela Kahealani wrote:
> On Monday 2004-10-11 06:43, Don Buchholz wrote:
> 
>>Well, in ~15 years of *nix, I've never had a problem with ".??*",
>>so your post got me thinking a little harder about corner cases.  ;-)
>>
>>- Don
> 
> 
> In 22 years of *nix, I also have never had problems with .??*,
> as nobody names files ..a or .a, so that they CAN use .??*
> since we are lazy typists, that's why EVERYthing in *nix is
> lower case and short. I've noticed that some software has been over the 
> years reprogrammed to protect against the USUALLY unwanted 
> interpretation of .. but you can't count on it, so the shortest
> spec to hidden files that is guaranteed never to match .. is .??*,
> and so that's what everyone uses, and thus nobody names files that are 
> hidden to NOT match that, because any such file "gets lost", and we 
> learn not to make them in the first place...

Unless you've been rootkitted, where the bad guys purposely try to
obscure the hacked files.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
-                                                                    -
-       "I'd explain it to you, but your brain might explode."       -
----------------------------------------------------------------------