> OK, my question: what's the best utility to preserve the permissions,
> UIDs, GIDs, sparse files,...? Woud GNU tar cut it? I was thinking about
> something like this:
Any pax or tar or cpio should do OK for UIDs, GIDs, permissions, devices,
etc.
Tomsrtbt does not include gnu-tar, it has a pax = tar = cpio.
Normal (non-gnu) cpio is better than normal (non-gnu) tar, as the tar
standard does not support arbitrary lengths of file names. If you use the
tomsrtbt pax, use either the pax or cpio syntax with the cpio file format.
You can maintain more portability with gnu-cpio than with gnu-tar.
I doubt the tomsrtbt pax/tar/cpio preserves sparseness. You might want to
check and see if there is anything on the system where you care...
> Will something like this work and not affect things like, say, the /dev
> directory, or the lost+found dirs on every partition (I think it won't but
> wanna make sure).
Gnu tar should work. Gnu cpio should work. I personally think cpio is a
better file format than tar, though I prefer the tar command syntax.
Tomsrtbt tar or cpio or pax will also work well enough, with the exception
of the sparse files issue.
I will copy the pax maintainer re: is there sparse support in the works?
-Tom
