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Not really. Dry run is useful for complex commands you're not sure the effects of. These options are so that when you intend to type:

rm /home/john/some/file.txt

But you accidentally type:

rm /home/john some/file.txt

It says:

rm: cannot remove '/home/john': Is a directory

Instead of john not having a home directory anymore.

And people aren't going to use a dry run option or interactive confirmation every time they run a simple command like that.




I was thinking more of

- listing how many files/directories would be moved

- listing how many files/directories would be overwritten

- telling whether the transfer will cross drives (especially for mv)

reasonably speaking this should not be included in the base posix cp and mv, but could be maybe provided as intrinsics in bash for example




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