Tech-Recipes - Latest Comments in Copy entire contents of a directory and preserve permissions | Solaris | Tech-Recipes

Re: Copy entire contents of a directory and preserve permissions | Solaris | Tech-Recipes

joppe Koning — Mon, 08 Nov 2004 01:54:08 -0000

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

Re: Copy entire contents of a directory and preserve permissions | Solaris | Tech-Recipes

Anonymous — Fri, 01 Oct 2004 04:18:50 -0000

<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>

Re: Copy entire contents of a directory and preserve permissions | Solaris | Tech-Recipes

Anonymous — Tue, 17 Aug 2004 11:13:10 -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.

Re: Copy entire contents of a directory and preserve permissions | Solaris | Tech-Recipes

Anonymous — Tue, 17 Aug 2004 10:34:09 -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.

Re: Copy entire contents of a directory and preserve permissions | Solaris | Tech-Recipes

fall-line — Mon, 19 Jul 2004 05:43:39 -0000

what's wrong with cp -Rp dir1 dir2 ?