cp -f cannot overwrite cp -i alias

Question

In my /home/user/.bashrc file, I have those aliases to prevent mistakes:

alias rm='rm -i'
alias cp='cp -i'
alias mv='mv -i'

If I'm really sure of what I'm doing, I can overwrite rm and mv aliases using rm -f or mv -f, it will not ask me if I really want to overwrite files.

The problem, is that it doesn't work for the cp command, using cp -f will still ask me a question.

Is this normal? What should I do in order to have cp -i alias by default and be able to use cp -f command too?

I'm using Debian Wheezy 64bit.

Answer 1

By giving cp -f, the option simply adds up with the existing option.

That is, if you have an alias cp='cp -i', the word cp gets replaced in the command cp -f, so you get cp -i -f file1 file2.

To override the alias:

\cp -f file1 file2

The backslash before the command will disable the alias. You can use command cp instead of \cp for readability.

Answer 2

While -f means force on all of them, for cp, it means force by trying to remove the destination first if the destination can't be updated.

For mv and rm, -f just overrides -i. But for cp, it changes the behavior of the utility, -f is not the opposite of -i in that case, cp -i -f makes sense and means, if the target exists, ask the user and if it can't be overridden, remove it first.

Even for mv and rm, adding -f is not the same as removing -i when it comes to warning and error messages sent to the user. For instance rm non-existent-file would report an error while rm -i -f non-existent-file would not.

As already mentioned, to remove the effect of -i, instead of adding -f, you should disable the alias using any of the solutions provided.