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I'm trying to understand the significance of the dot in bash and how it differs from an asterisk. Can someone please elaborate? For example, what's the difference between cp -ar /foo/. /foo2/ and cp -pr /foo/* /foo2/

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The dot (.) is just the . directory inside a directory which is the same as the directory itself (ls -la /foo will show it to you). So if you copy foo/. elsewhere, you effectively copy all the tree below foo without copying foo itself (you're copying it into foo2/. which is the same as foo2).

/foo/* is expanded by the shell to the list of non-hidden files and directories in /foo, so it would copy the same directory structure under /foo into /foo2 as well, except for the dotfiles/dotdirs. Effectively, cp will receive (potentially) many arguments. If the list is too big, it may even cause the execution of cp to fail.

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Sorry but I'm getting confused. So by nature, the asterisk makes the command recursive? In other words cp -r /foo/* does the same thing as cp /foo/* ? – Mike B Jan 21 at 21:28
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@MikeB, no, the shell only expands the list of files in the /foo directory. It doesn't alter the behavior of cp. Use set -x or echo cp -pr /foo/* /foo2 to see what's going on. It's important to realise that it's the shell that expands the wildcards. cp doesn't see the star. – Stephane Chazelas Jan 21 at 21:31

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