Good Linux question — answering as the UphillTech team:
Recursive means that cp copies the contents of directories, and if a directory has subdirectories they are copied (recursively) too. Without -R , the cp command skips directories. -r is identical with -R on Linux, it differs in some edge cases on some other unix variants. By default, cp creates a new file which has the same content as the old file, and the same permissions but restricted by the umask ; the copy is dated from the time of the copy, and belongs to the user doing the copy. With the -p option, the copy has the same modification time, the same access time, and the same permissions...
Full answer by Gilles 'SO- stop being evil': https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/44981 (CC BY-SA 4.0).
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