On Sun, Feb 7, 2010 at 2:09 PM, Theo de Raadt <dera...@cvs.openbsd.org> wrote: >> Why does cp need to be portable? Who's porting OpenBSD cp to other systems? > > Will the same diff be added to every io generating program in /bin? > > They all generate io, of course.
I was planning on something similar for tar. But that's it really. They are the programs that read/write in a loop, where the reads/writes are blocked by writes/reads. ls doesn't generate IO of the same magnitude as cp, the writes are very small in proportion to reads, and the writes don't go to disk either. Very different. Programs like scp are also unaffected (unless you forget the colon), because one of the ends is network. The source and sink aren't dependent.
