emanuele6 1728664343 learn cp -R foo/bar/baz some/dir  if both "foo/bar/baz" and "some/dir" are directories, copies files into the destination as "some/dir/baz/f1", "some/dir/baz/f2", etc, and NOT as "some/dir/foo/bar/baz/f1", etc.  So it only uses the basename of the source. This is the reason why  cp -R foo/. bar  works: it will make cp copy files into "bar/./f", instead of "bar/foo/f".