Double dash long options are basically a GNU extension. BSD utilities generally don't support them. Apparently macOS does not either (since it's based off of FreeBSD)
And the received wisdom about long options in the BSDs is a quarter of a century out of date. When the BSDs gained a getopt_long() in their C libraries thanks to Klausner and Baron, long options quietly started appearing. This process has been gradually and quietly on-going for the whole of the 21st century.
Over a decade after macOS/Mac OS X was initially released:
> macOS (previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a proprietary Unix[7][8] operating system, derived from OPENSTEP for Mach and FreeBSD, which has been marketed and developed by Apple since 2001.
> Darwin is the core Unix-like operating system of macOS, iOS, watchOS, tvOS, iPadOS, audioOS, visionOS, and bridgeOS. It previously existed as an independent open-source operating system, first released by Apple in 2000. It is composed of code derived from NeXTSTEP, FreeBSD[3] and other BSD operating systems,[7] Mach, and […]
There are implementations of cp out in the wild that do not recognise the --recursive flag. OpenBSD was mentioned in the article and there’s also busybox cp https://busybox.net/downloads/BusyBox.html
Double dash long options are basically a GNU extension. BSD utilities generally don't support them. Apparently macOS does not either (since it's based off of FreeBSD)
macOS was based off NeXTSTEP, not FreeBSD.
And the received wisdom about long options in the BSDs is a quarter of a century out of date. When the BSDs gained a getopt_long() in their C libraries thanks to Klausner and Baron, long options quietly started appearing. This process has been gradually and quietly on-going for the whole of the 21st century.
> macOS was based off NextBSD, not FreeBSD.
"NextBSD" was first released in 2015:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NextBSD
Over a decade after macOS/Mac OS X was initially released:
> macOS (previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a proprietary Unix[7][8] operating system, derived from OPENSTEP for Mach and FreeBSD, which has been marketed and developed by Apple since 2001.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacOS
> Darwin is the core Unix-like operating system of macOS, iOS, watchOS, tvOS, iPadOS, audioOS, visionOS, and bridgeOS. It previously existed as an independent open-source operating system, first released by Apple in 2000. It is composed of code derived from NeXTSTEP, FreeBSD[3] and other BSD operating systems,[7] Mach, and […]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_(operating_system)
I remember reading release notes for FreeBSD in the '00s and seeing the exact same lines in the release notes for earlier versions of OS X.
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There are implementations of cp out in the wild that do not recognise the --recursive flag. OpenBSD was mentioned in the article and there’s also busybox cp https://busybox.net/downloads/BusyBox.html
I believe that -R is the safe works-as-expected-everywhere option.