See URL and following messages in that thread for detailed bug description (Coreutils Bug Mailinglist). Summary: cp --parents reports error when called with an absolute path as source due to a wrong number of slashes in the generated target path. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: see URL short variant (/tmp/bin should not exist): cp --parents /bin/cp /tmp Actual Results: error message : cp: failed to get attributes of 'bin': No such file or directory files are copied but permissions are wrong Expected Results: copy files while creating necessary directories with correct permissions for additional information of my testcase prior to finding the mailing list see forum thread: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-381398.html
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 105639 ***
