bug#4416: 23.1; suggestion: a elisp function for copying and deleting whole dir

["Xah Lee" <xah@xahlee.org>]

here's my draft implementation. (thanks to Andreas Politz who pointed out 
the dired-aux function)

(defun copy-directory-recursive (source-dir dest-dir)
  "Copy whole a directory SOURCE-DIR to DEST-DIR.
Note, the semantics of source-dir dest-dir is different from the unix “cp” 
utility.
In unix's “cp -R”, if dest-dir exists, it'll copy source-dir itself, else, 
just source-dir's children.

In copy-directory-recursive, it always copy source-dir's children.

In both, the dest-dir may or may not exist. If not, it'll be created. 
However, dest-dir's parent must exist.

This function is based on dired-copy-file-recursive.
Behavior about linked files, etc, are from that function."
  (require 'dired-aux)
  (dired-copy-file-recursive source-dir dest-dir nil nil nil 'always)
  )

haven't worked on delete-directory-recursive yet...

  Xah
∑ http://xahlee.org/

☄