Comment by ButlerianJihad

You know, when I came into Unix in the 1990s we still didn't care about recursive copy, because all admins learned the standard idiom to copy over a hierarchy:

  tar cf - . | ( cd /new/path; tar xpf - )

or thereabouts, because at the time, `tar` was more than capable of doing all the filesystem tricks that `cp` was clumsy with, and we understood this idiom well. You could also `dump` an entire block device.

I believe that my motivation was that the Unix wars were still raging hotly; as a sysadmin I needed portable skills and I wasn't tied or certified to one vendor's Unix, and therefore I sought out idioms that worked on SunOS, HP/UX, AIX, BSD, you name it. "cp -r" didn't enjoy that stable support at the time.