cp -r hangs. use cp -R.

My primary purpose for this blog, is to make small little nuggets that a search engine will find, when you have a problem, and you haven't slept for three days, and you type in the first thing that comes to you.

I could do this with keywords: cp, cp -r, cp -R, hangs, takes forever, special devices, licq_fifo, linux, unix, large copy, massive copy, etc.

But that's not the way you think when you haven't slept. If you're a human, you ask questions "why is my cp hanging?" or "my copy is hanging, but why?" or just statements "my cp hangs" or "my copy hangs." Very commonly, you think in terms of time-based sequences of statements, as if you were talking to a doctor ... something like "I'm on Linux. I had to copy a lot of data from one disk to another. One disk is remote, using NFS. I used cp -r. It took forever, so I did df, and found that the new disk size wasn't increasing. Then I killed it with control-c. And ran it cp -r -v, to see what was going on. It got hung up on a file licq_fifo. I googled licq_fifo, and found out it was a special device. cp -r doesn't follow symbolic links, why would it not recognize special devices? Oh, wait, I remember this, it's a normal problem. I typed "man cp", and then the more recent "info cp". And, right, cp -R will ignore special device files. I should go to sleep."

This is of course the simplest problem, quite quick to resolve. But look at the volume of problem-solving information in the above paragraph. What can we do to make search engines more like expert systems, so that we can preserve more of the world's problem-solving-sequence information? Not just with IT, but with everything involving such traversals of ordered fuzzy graphs?