Perl IS portable Unix, that is it's strength and personality. (btw this recent flurry of windows programmers without unixy background using perl seems to confirm how strong and usefull this design philosophy is).

So this is rather - why doesn't Un*x have 'filecopy' syscall? Because it's not that common operation, when you work on something you move it, rename it, modify it AND archive it.

'copy' syscall would be usefull for archiving... or would it?

Besides, unix way is to be ascetic and elegant, avoiding putting messy and slow algorithms under the hood, and filecopy is definitely slow ( you want syscall with fast filecopy - great, here's hardlink for you ).

That is also a reason why rename fails across filesystems, it would be possible to have 'rename' call that works in such conditions ( look at the source of 'mv' command, such non-unix 'complete' design would put all that source into system, this would also add non-determinism to syscalls - normal rename returns very fast, across filesystems rename would take forever )

It seems like you don't appreciate that?

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