Quirky Behavior of the `cp` Command

I was writing a just script where I wanted to move a compiled result to a folder. That's easy enough:

cp some-file ~/bin

This works great when the ~/bin folder exists, which it did while I was writing this script.

But then I ran it on a second computer, where I hadn't created that folder yet. Instead, it created a file called bin in my home directory. This sort of makes sense; cp some-file ~/some-new-file is exactly what I'd run to create a new file in that directory. But in this case, I always want my file to land in a directory of that name, never to create a new file.

Luckily, cp has a provision for this: end your destination path in a trailing slash and it will always interpret that as a directory. If it doesn't exist, the command will error out rather than create a file named for a directory.

Here's how cp some-file TARGET acts in each case:

I'm not sure if this is common knowledge, but it had never occurred to me until now. It made for an easy fix and a nice lesson learned!