UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I'm not all that much of a newbie but I've not encountered this before. Happens both in Cygwin and in Mac OS X (Darwin):

Code:

cp -R /path/to/foo/.* /path/to/bar

(where directory 'bar' exists)

... seems to copy not only the contents of directory 'foo', but also other directories that are "siblings" of foo!

On the other hand,

Code:

cp -R /path/to/foo/* /path/to/bar

... works the way I'd expect -- copying files and subdirectories of foo into bar. (But I want the '.' files too.)

Can someone clue me on what's happening?

What do you normally find in a directory?

Code:

ra:/home/vbe $  ls -al
total 18
drwxrwxr-x   6 vbe        bin             96 Jun  2 16:21 .
drwxrwxrwx  25 vbe        seinf         5120 Jun  2 15:05 ..
etc...

You see the directory ..? when you type cd .., where do you find yourself? and what do you see in the now current directory?

Oh, my!
Come to think of it, I've seen commands that have flags for specifically ignoring '.' and '..', but cp doesn't seem to have such an option. Is there a way to "wildcard" my dot-directories to cp, or do I need to cook up a 'find' command to do this?

(What I'm really trying to do is set up a default home directory by copying from a model directory. Perhaps I should just copy and rename the model directory.)

in that case, I put in a directory called default_home which contains all the files I want: .profile, .kshrc, .login, .exrc, .cshrc and copy using cp -p <default_home>/.[ceklp]* <newhome>/.
then I if required, change the ownership...
Like that I keep the original timestamp and can compare if files have been modified/customized...

All the best