How to Force 'Cp' to Overwrite Directory Instead of Creating Another One Inside

How to force cp to overwrite without confirmation

You can do yes | cp -rf xxx yyy, but my gutfeeling says that if you do it as root - your .bashrc or .profile has an alias of cp to cp -i, most modern systems (primarily RH-derivatives) do that to root profiles.

You can check existing aliases by running alias at the command prompt, or which cp to check aliases only for cp.

If you do have an alias defined, running unalias cp will abolish that for the current session, otherwise you can just remove it from your shell profile.

You can temporarily bypass an alias and use the non-aliased version of a command by prefixing it with \, e.g. \cp whatever

Copying directories to a server and deleting all unnecessary files

rsync --delete is the trick.

Thanks to Gordon Davisson and his comment.

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