Ralph Shumaker wrote: > 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.
Pesonally, I would never use cpio for anything. But that is me, and my almost total lack of understandinf of cpio. > So far, I like cp the best. I'm a tar fan, myself. cp -a is nice, too. > But there is primarily one thing that I do > *not* like. It doesn't keep the timestamps of links. Hardlinks, or symlinks? Symlinks are much harder to deal with, as once they are made, the filesystems tend to move all further operations to the target file instead of the symlink itself. > The other thing that is disconcerting about the cp, ll, diff I do is > that directory sizes don't necessarily stay the same. As you make more files in a directory, the directory size will increase to hold the maximum number of dirents. Once you delete files from that directory, the directory size remains the same. This is why copying over a whole tree will likely result in some directories size becoming smaller. > 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? cmp, or diff. -john -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
