DESCRIPTION
In its first form, ditto copies one or more source files or directories to a destination directory. If the destination directory does not exist it will be created before the first source is copied. If the destination directory already exists
then the source directories are merged with the previous contents of the destination.
In its second form, ditto copies a file to the supplied dst_file pathname.
The next two forms reflect ditto's ability to create and extract archives. These archives can be either CPIO format (preferred for unix content) or PKZip (for Windows compatibility). src_archive (and dst_archive) can be the single character
'-', causing ditto to read (write) archive data from stdin (or to stdout, respectively).
ditto follows symbolic links provided as arguments but does not follow any links as it traverses the source or destination hierarchies. ditto overwrites existing files, symbolic links, and devices in the destination when these are copied from a
source. The resulting files, links, and devices will have the same mode, access time, modification time, owner, and group as the source items from which they are copied. Pipes, sockets, and files with names beginning with .nfs or .afpDeleted
will be ignored. ditto does not modify the mode, owner, group, extended attributes, or ACLs of existing directories in the destination. Files and symbolic links cannot overwrite directories or vice-versa.
ditto can be used to "thin" Universal Mach-O binaries during a copy. ditto can also copy files selectively based on the contents of a BOM ("Bill of Materials") file. ditto preserves file hard links (but not directory hard links) present in the
source directories and preserves setuid and setgid modes when run as the superuser.
ditto will preserve resource forks and HFS meta-data information when copying unless instructed otherwise using --norsrc . Similarly, ditto will preserve extended attributes and Access Control Lists (ACLs) unless --noextattr or --noacl is
passed. DITTONORSRC can be set in the environment as an alias to --norsrc --noextattr --noacl on the command line.
