Andre,
2. What is supposed to happen when the source is a directory, the recursive flag is set, and the target is a file? I assume remove target, create target dir, and copy? And if overwrite flag is not set, throw AlreadyExists?
Uhm, tough one! Unix shell would say:
koks merzky /tmp : mkdir a koks merzky /tmp : touch a/a b koks merzky /tmp : cp -Rf a b cp: cannot overwrite non-directory `b' with directory `a'
We don't have an exception for this. So, yes, I would concur with your interpretation: the target file should get removed, and a target dir with the same name should get created.
Deleting a file in the case the user wanted to delete a directory is bad, IMHO. I'ld suggest to throw an AlreadyExists exeption.
3. What is supposed to happen with a recursive copy where the overwrite flag is NOT set, and some of the destinations already exist? Copy to the non-existing destinations and throw AlreadyExists?
Puh, no idea! The POSIX C API has no recursive directory copy, and the POSIX shells have no notion of overwrite flags (only of !overwrite -- -f/--force has a slightly different meaning).
I agree that your interpretation seems the most logical one, but I would assume that it would make sense not to make any assumptions on what files got copied before the exception gets raised. Also, the exception should name the target entry causing the trouble.
Agreed. Regards Hartmut