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Comment by embedding-shape

1 day ago

> links to the source code but never actually says what it is.

The snippet of code makes it very clear what the difference is, no?

flag_copy_as_regular = 1 VS flag_copy_as_regular = 0, where regular would be a "regular" and not "special" file.

Only clear to those with a heavy UNIX background-- I understood and correctly interpreted it on first read, but the concept of a "regular file" is a bit in the wonk territory for most users, though the implication on symbolic links is a very practical one that surely lead to the removal (in the implementations where it was removed) of this option, since its very surprising that copying a directory heirarchy would cause symbolic links to become copies of what they linked to, instead of remaining symbolic links in the resulting directory.