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.
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
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
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.
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.
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?
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