Henrik Carlqvist wrote: > To get the behaviour you want it might be easier to use tar: > > tar --remove-files -cf - . | ( cd /new/path ; tar -xvf - ) > > Tar will give you some ugly error messages directories changing and being > unable to remove current directory but at least the files will be copied > and removed in the order that you want.
That tar command feels scary to me in the face of crashes. The oringinal message brought up the problem of disconnecting a usb drive while in the middle of a copy. In the case of using mv if the copy fails then the source will not be removed. Reattaching the drive and then restarting the mv command is possible. In the tar --remove-files case the data may still be in transit. Some files will be in the pipeline between the commands but will have been removed from the filesystem already by the first tar before the second tar can write the data to disk. A failure during the copy risks losing the file in the pipeline. Bob
