When copying directories with sudo it copies just the first level of its hierarchy

Question

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When I copy some directory (dir) recursively with sudo in bash it copies just the first level of the dir hierarchy, but when used without sudo it copies the dir with all its subdirs, though commands in command-line have the difference only in the presence of sudo.

Why does this happen?

For example:

k@l:/$ tree
.
|
|__a
|  |
|  |__b
|     | 
|     |__1.htm   
|
|__c
k@l:/$ sudo cp -r /a/b /c/d
k@l:/$ cd /c
k@l:/c$ ls
d
k@l:/c$ cd d
bash: cd: /c/d: Permission denied
k@l:/c$ tree
.
|__d [error opening dir]

1 directory, 0 files

Answer 1

When you do sudo cp -r /a/b /c/d the folder are copied to /c/d/ as root with root as the owner, therefore you get a Permission Denied since you need root permission to open the directory, try opening /c/d/ in a Root Terminal; alternatively, you need to alter the file owner or fix the permission by using chown/chmod so your current user will be able to access the folder.

Note: sudo cd won't work since cd is a shell command, not programs.

Answer 2

Maybe /c/d had permissions 700 with a different owner. Try sudo chmod -R 755 /c/d.

Answer 3

I'd rather use cp -a instead of cp -r. The latter might not preserve some file attributes.

Answer 4

Instead of changing the cp command, you could run sudo as a specific user doing something like

sudo -u thisUser cp -r /a/b /c/d

Nevertheless, this will work only if thisUser has permissions for /a/b