Bryan ODonoghue said: >> On my system (Fedora-1) cp -a already includes -r = --recursive . > > Just as a general whinge... when I tell my system rm -rf / , I really > didn't mean rm -rfi / damnit. You can get around this once with a backslash: \rm -rf / or forever by finding and removing the alias to rm -i. /Ciaran.