boost copy_file has inconsistent behavior when overwrite_if_exists is used

Question

I am having trouble with boost copy_file(version 1.40.0) method, I would like to overwrite the destination file completely, but it ends up merging source file and destination file if destination text file has more lines.

copy_file(source, destination, overwrite_if_exists)

I would envision it working totally differently, after this operation I would expect source and destination to be exactly the same.

Is this the way this method supposed to work?

Yes I can rename the destination file, copy the source to destination path and if all goes well, I can delete the destination file, but it shocks me that there is no atomic way of doing this in boost.

Answer 1

According to an answer in how to perform boost::filesystem copy_file with overwrite , this is a bug of boost, and it is fixed in version 1.46.0