begin quoting Ralph Shumaker as of Wed, Sep 21, 2005 at 07:48:37PM -0700: > As suggested by some on the list, I tried cpio for copying whole > partitions (not to mention using dd) and parts of partitions. I did not > find it any better than cp with the appropriate switches, but in fact worse.
Interesting! > So far, I like cp the best. But there is primarily one thing that I do > *not* like. It doesn't keep the timestamps of links. I tried touching What options are you passing to cp? > a few of the destination links after the copy, but instead of the links' > timestamps changing, the timestamps were changed on the files to which > they link. > > The simplest way that I can think of to verify all files copied over is > to "ll -aR > ll-aR.hde2" and "ll -aR > ll-aR.hdg2" and then "diff > ll-aR.hde2 ll-aR.hdg2 > ll-aR.hdg2-hda2.diff", but every link shows up Er, what's the ll business? That's a common alias for "ls -l", but it's not a standard command on any of my Linux boxen. > there because of the timestamp. And there are a whole *lotta* links. I > can pipe through a 'grep -v " --> "' and get a much smaller output. And > although this assures me that the objects of the links copied fine, it > eliminates the certainty that all *links* got copied. Is there a way to > make cp keep the timestamps of the copied links? As far as I can tell, > any attempt to modify the timestamp of the link just gets applied to its > target. What if the target isn't there? mv $target $target.__save__ touch $link blah blah blah mv $target.__save__ $target > The other thing that is disconcerting about the cp, ll, diff I do is > that directory sizes don't necessarily stay the same. If the size > differs at all, usually the copy is taking less space. (I don't > remember seeing any that ended taking more.) But this occurrence is > much, much less frequent than the link dates changing. Yes, that's expected. > Is there a way to get a reliable listing of the source files, do a byte > for byte comparison, and report only the ones that are different? Isn't that what the cmp command does? -Stewart "Never thought about looking at a link's timestamp before" Stremler -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
