New Linux util.
looks inside
Non-copyleft license
I appreciate that it's not trying to replace cp but the lack of copyleft is always disconcerting.
this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2026
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What's the risk here though, a company like Amazon makes a closed source version of it?
If it was a file format library, or something like a web server I'd get it. But stuff like cp are effectively just userspace wrappers around kernel APIs.
yeah, like, supposedly it can be hard to use GPL with some rust dependencies, but the MPL is right there as a decent compromise.
how can it be hard? permissive licenses are compatible to the GPL, the opposite not though
Static linking makes things difficult. I'm not sure what the details are, that's just what I've heard from Rust developers.
Because of static linking, a single GPL dependency turns the entire resulting binary into a GPL licensed one, so yeah just use something like the MPL in that case (Or EUPL, which I hear is similar)
LGPL has the same issue, since it only provides an exception for dynamic linking. But honestly that's all an issue for lawyers and judges to sort out (I bet you could win in court with an argument that dynamically linking to GPL is actually fine).
MIT License 🤢🤮
Welcome to rust where MIT is just recommended yet everyone does use it for licensing.
What's wrong with rsync?
I've had cp aliased to rsync with my flags for years. It seems like a lot of newcomers try to "fix" stuff before they really understand what's available. Or they just like to play around with different programming languages. Which is fine, but usually it's not really interesting to me.
It's a damn pain to remember all the flags. How many flags can a program friggin have? I'm always afraid that some flag I enter will reverse the sync and delete everything in the source folder because the target is empty.
I use rsync only when all params have been reseasrched and tested. cpx presumably just requires cpx - r source target instead of 5 rsync flags.
What 5 flags did rsync need? I always just do -av and go about my day. And the -v is kinda optional.
How do you get the progress bar?
The only one you need is -a. -avx if you want verbose and compression.
I just looked it up and - x means one filesystem. But does - v give you a progress bar or just a lost of stuff copied?
IIRC rsync also treats the trailing slash in a special manner that I always have to look up.
--progress=info2 could be a bit shorter imo
That's probably the next wheel some overzealous Rust dev will reinvent.
Too many letters to type obvi! /s
eza
fd-find
Which other modernized tools to get and enjoy fam?
So many things from the Modern UNIX tools repo!
My daily drivers are:
lsd instead of ls - colors, icons, tree-view, more formatting,
dust instead of du for better formatting,
jq for viewing JSON,
gtop instead of top just because it's so pretty
(I've aliased most of these, but there are a few toolchains that have broken)
That dust is looking fine. I have been using btop myself.
I find btop's color schemes don't with well with changing between light and dark mode in the terminal when theme background is turned off.
This is very true. I find flat-remix-light to be somewhat decent (still pretty bad) among the options.
Oof zoxide is my baby. One of the best new utils.
also ripgrep and fzf.
check out this blog post I wrote about cool TUI and CLI tools I use. Not all of them are "modernized" but you'll find some cool things there.
dust and ripgrep