Copy task fails because of unrelated file in destination directory

I created a copy task with an output directory set to /. My idea is to copy some files to /etc and /usr/local/. When the task is executed, it fails during the output snapshotting phase because of an invalid symbolic link /usr/share/man/man1/x86_64-linux-gnu-gcov-tool.1.gz. Is this an expected behaviour?

Personally, I would expect the the Gradle to only snapshot related parts of the output, not the whole file system if I specify / as the output directory. Shouldn’t it only snapshot files that have been copied at least once?