cp: invalid option -- 'o'

Question

I'm following an installation script on GitHub and one of the steps is:

cp sources/openssl/1.0.1p/Android.mk -o sources/openssl/$OPENSSL_VERSION/Android.mk

But my terminal threw an error cp: invalid option -- 'o'

I checked man cp on my Ubuntu, and there's no option -o. Is this a MAC OS thing? What does cp -o stand for?

Solution 1

You can safely remove the -o option. Btw, is $OPENSSL_VERSION set?

Solution 2

That's a typo. There is no implementation of cp that has a -o option on any Unix that I know of. My guess is that this option may safely be removed.

It may be that they meant cp -p (preserve mode, timestamp and ownership when used with GNU cp and others), or cp -i for interactive prompting in case the file already exists.

They are obviously using GNU cp though, since they intermingle operands with options. Ordinary tools usually stop parsing the command line at the first non-option, but GNU tools will try to be smart.

Comments

[Admin]

I'm not sure where the -o came from but I am presuming that it isn't needed and the copy is simply copying from one source destination to a source directory

[Adhy Satya]

Thanks. Yes, it is set (OPENSSL_VERSION=1.0.2h)

[Stéphane Chazelas]

Anyway, cp file -o dir is meant to copy the file and -o files to dir. Only GNU (or GNU-like like busybox) cp would take that -o as an option (and only when $POSIXLY_CORRECT is not in the environment)

[JdeBP]

Possibly it was confusion with the common curl…-o. But this is all guesswork. Only Lei Pi can really explain.

[user000001]

@StéphaneChazelas On ubuntu --one-file-system option is abbreviated to -x

[Stéphane Chazelas]

@user000001, yes, but --o (or --on, or --one...) would also work (note the double dash)

[user000001]

@StéphaneChazelas: Ah, I missed the second dash. It's really cool that you can abbreviate long options like that, I hadn't realized it even after many years of using linux. Thanks for letting me know :)

[Kusalananda]

@user000001 If you ever write a script (or documentation), don't abbreviate the options though. It makes it unnecessarily hard to understand.