Question

What does -i option do?

(a) interactive copying

(b) recursively copying

(c) updating

(d) none of the mentioned

I got this question in semester exam.

My question comes from Copying a File: cp Command in chapter Handling Ordinary Files of Unix

Answer 1

Right option is (a) interactive copying

The explanation is: (-i) option is used for interactive copying. It means that suppose if we invoke a command like cp file1  file2 and if file2 already exists then it will be overwritten which can be a nightmare for many users. To avoid this, we use -i option. It provides us with a warning before overwriting a file. It asks the user whether to overwrite the file or not. The syntax is cp  -i source_file  dest_file.