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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-30T18:29:06+00:00

I have some PHP code I’m moving from a development directory to the webserver

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I have some PHP code I’m moving from a development directory to the webserver directory on OS X (Snow leopard).

I noticed something quirky I didn’t understand with cp. I wrote a deployment script and noticed that when I run:

sudo cp -rf phpfun "/Library/Webserver/Documents/phpfun"

The command runs without an issue, but doesn’t overwrite the files inside of the directory (namely index.php).

But if I run:

sudo cp -rf phpfun "/Library/Webserver/Documents/"

Everything is written as expected. What’s the deal here? What is cp doing in the first case?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    In the first case, it’s copying the phpfun directory inside of /Library/Webserver/Documents/phpfun, meaning you end up with /Library/Webserver/Documents/phpfun/phpfun. Probably not what you want.

    The cp(1) man page has all of the information you might need about what’s going on and why.

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