如何在ruby脚本中复制损坏的符号链接

Question

I want to copy all the contents from one directory to another (including broken symlinks) in my Ruby script. I am using FileUtils.cp_r 'src/.', 'dest' but it is complaining about the broken symlinks. Can someone please help me with this? It is a show-stopper for me right now.

Answer 1

FileUtils.cp_r internally copies the src folder recursively to dest . When it finds a symlink, it will create a symlink using File#symlink method (Refer line 1369 of fileutils.rb ).

The documentation of File#symlink states that:

Creates a symbolic link called new_name for the existing file old_name. Raises a NotImplemented exception on platforms that do not support symbolic links.

So, it seems that it may not be possible to use FileUtils.cp_r to copy directories if the one of the symlinks in it is broken and pointing to a non-existing file.

Workaround

You can execute shell command cp -r command from your ruby script, it may not be platform-independent code and may not be easy to debug, but it will help you to get around the given scenario which you consider to be a show-stopper .

src = "/path/to/src/dir"
dest = "/path/to/dest/dir"

`cp -r #{src} #{dest}`