Zachary DeAquila wrote: > > >Martin Str|mberg wrote: > > > >> Just wanted to warn you that cp copies symbolic links as real files. > >> Thus if you had: > >> > >> -rw-r----- 1 ms318 erisoft 4 Apr 11 11:07 jjj > >> lrwxrwxrwx 1 ms318 erisoft 3 Apr 11 11:07 kkk -> jjj > >> > >> in old and did "cp -r old new/" you would get > >> > >> -rw-r----- 1 ms318 erisoft 4 Apr 11 11:07 jjj > >> -rw-r----- 1 ms318 erisoft 4 Apr 11 11:07 kkk > >> > >Oops. Another gotcha. Is there a flag to cp to preserve links as > >links? The disadvantage of making a beeg tarfile is that it will take > >up a lot of room, so you need to have 3x(distribution size) available to > >do it that way. > > as root, you want to move /old to /new: > > cd /old > tar -cvf - . |(cd /new; tar -xvf - ) > > that makes a tarfile in a pipe so it doesn't have to sit on disk... > > --Zachary
...or with GNU tar, and a small sanity check: (cd /old && tar cfS - .) | (cd /new && tar xvfp -) That way, if either "/old" or "/new" don't exist, the copy stops immediately. If you type the bit with semicolons a lot, eventually you may typo, and end up destroying files.
