Comments on: Copy entire contents of a directory and preserve permissions

By: joppe Koning

joppe Koning — Mon, 08 Nov 2004 06:54:08 +0000

cp uses a caracter for caracter copy method. copying with tar is faster because is uses greater buffers

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 01 Oct 2004 08:18:50 +0000

flarg wrote:

In addition, I think you meant ‘cp -a’, which is equivilant to ‘cp -dpR’. The -d flag will dereference symbolic links.

‘cp -Rp dir1 dir2′ doesn’t preserve symlinks. It will instead copy the contents of the target:

If dir1 looks like this:

-rw-r--r-- 1 flarg group 0 Aug 17 14:59 file1 lrwxrwxrwx 1 flarg group 4 Aug 17 14:59 link1 -> /tmp

If you use ‘cp -Rp’, then ‘link1′ will become a directory:

cp -Rp dir1 dir2 -rw-r--r-- 1 flarg group 0 Aug 17 14:59 file1 drwxrwxrwx 7 flarg groupl 1701 Aug 17 14:59 link1

You really want the ‘-d’ flag to dereference any symbolic links.

By:

Tue, 17 Aug 2004 15:13:10 +0000

In addition, I think you meant ‘cp -a’, which is equivilant to ‘cp -dpR’. The -d flag will dereference symbolic links.

‘cp -Rp dir1 dir2′ doesn’t preserve symlinks. It will instead copy the contents of the target:

If dir1 looks like this:

-rw-r--r-- 1 flarg group 0 Aug 17 14:59 file1 lrwxrwxrwx 1 flarg group 4 Aug 17 14:59 link1 -> /tmp

If you use ‘cp -Rp’, then ‘link1′ will become a directory:

cp -Rp dir1 dir2 -rw-r--r-- 1 flarg group 0 Aug 17 14:59 file1 drwxrwxrwx 7 flarg groupl 1701 Aug 17 14:59 link1

You really want the ‘-d’ flag to dereference any symbolic links.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 17 Aug 2004 14:34:09 +0000

‘cp -Rp’ is not supported on most Unixes. ‘-Rp’ flags are only supported by the version of ‘ls’ that comes with the GNU Core-utils, which is not installed everywhere.

The tar command will work on all versions of Unix.

By: fall-line

fall-line — Mon, 19 Jul 2004 09:43:39 +0000

what’s wrong with cp -Rp dir1 dir2 ?