> better yet - cp could determine it's copying from a tmpfs filesystem and do that automatically. but we're not going to patch binutils for that, when a simple, 30 line utility does the trick.
Why not? I think it's a perfect reasonable use case and should be made into a patch.
Why not give something back?
I'm guessing that figuring out whether it's a tmpfs filesystem is a tricky thing in a cross-platform way (i.e. acceptable for acceptance into the upstream tool sources). It might actually be more appropriate to keep this special use case as a separate tool, rather than add extra branches and special cases to the main cp tool.