Note that the * will not copy any of the files prefixed with a . in the root directory. It is a little tricky to wild card these files because one does not want to include the . and .. directories so usually one adds .??* to pick up everything else except for 1 and 2 character filenames prefixed with the . e.g. .a, .bc. To copy these as well, you will want to list them by doing an ls -a
in the root directory first and typing those explicitly.

In Summary, I would recommend this instead:

tar cf - * .??* | ( cd /target; tar xfp -)


but first do:

ls -a


and if you see anything starting with a . (besides ..) that is not followed by more then two characters, add those as well e.g.

tar cf - * .??* .a .z .bc | ( cd /target; tar xfp -)

I take it cp -pR directory newplace doesn't do the job?

Not always, no.

for instance I recently used this to do a full path copy of some contents on a bad cdrom. For whatever reason I needed the entire path. So I did a variation and put it into a script so I could use it later. It went like this:

#!/bin/bash

find $1 | while read i;
do tar cfv - $i | ( cd $2 ; tar xfpv - )
done

So I could do something like this on the command line:

fullpathcp /dvd/Examples ~/tmp/copy

probably not the best use of cpu resources, but I got plenty of cycles to spare.

Also you can do interesting things with variations of this.

Like if your on a ftp server and they have a ls.gz file. This lists the contents of the server so you can go like this:

ftp server blah
username:anonymous
anonymous login ok. Please give E-mail address
password:
> get ls.gz "|gunzip - |less"
or
> get ls.gz "|gunzip - |grep p0rn"

And that way you can scroll around up and down. Or untar a file and download it onto your system...
> get big.fat.tar.gz "| (cd ~/tmp/ ; tar zxf -)"

or at least something similar.

Also you can use Netcat to transfer files similar to that and so on and so forth. It's but one peice in a puzzle you need to build bigger and better scripts.

<ul id="quote"><h6>Anonymous wrote:</h6>Not always, no.

for instance I recently used this to do a full path copy of some contents on a bad cdrom. For whatever reason I needed the entire path. So I did a variation and put it into a script so I could use it later. It went like this:

#!/bin/bash

find $1 | while read i;
do tar cfv - $i | ( cd $2 ; tar xfpv - )
done

So I could do something like this on the command line:

fullpathcp /dvd/Examples ~/tmp/copy

probably not the best use of cpu resources, but I got plenty of cycles to spare.

Also you can do interesting things with variations of this.

Like if your on a ftp server and they have a ls.gz file. This lists the contents of the server so you can go like this:

ftp server blah
username:anonymous
anonymous login ok. Please give E-mail address
password:
> get ls.gz "|gunzip - |less"
or
> get ls.gz "|gunzip - |grep p0rn"

And that way you can scroll around up and down. Or untar a file and download it onto your system...
> get big.fat.tar.gz "| (cd ~/tmp/ ; tar zxf -)"

or at least something similar.

Also you can use Netcat to transfer files similar to that and so on and so forth. It's but one peice in a puzzle you need to build bigger and better scripts.</ul>

Better is
tar cf - . | tar -C /target -xpf -

I've usually seen it with B for reassembling short reads into full records (reading 4.2BSD pipes). In other words, rightsize the blocks for the filesystem.

tar cf - * | ( cd /target; tar xfBp -)