5 comments

• 

  fall-line

  4 years ago

  what's wrong with cp -Rp dir1 dir2 ?
  reply
• 

  Anonymous

  4 years ago

  '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.
  reply
• 

  Anonymous

  4 years ago

  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.
  reply
• 

  Anonymous

  4 years ago

  <ul id="quote"><h6>flarg wrote:</h6>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.</ul>
  reply
• 

  joppe Koning

  4 years ago

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