Another argument in favour of cp in Linux: holes in sparse files are
kept correctly, whereas using tar they are not.
It is curious that this is very OS dependent.
In FreeBSD, with cp, holes always go away, using tar, or better
dump/restore is a way to keep all file attributes.
In Linux, cp -a seems to be better for archives than tar, because it
preserves these properties better, even across devices.
2008/12/16 Dale <rdalek1...@gmail.com>:
> Daniel Troeder wrote:
>> Am Dienstag, den 16.12.2008, 03:15 -0600 schrieb Dale:
[...]
>> While this will work perfectly well, this command is a waste of
>> resources. The compression ("-z") makes locally no sense, and there is
>> no need to tar the data (which will basically just concat files). You
>> will get the exact same result with
>> # cp -a /source /dest
>>
>> If the FS has been formatted before, no fragmentation should occur in
>> every scenario, as long as no parallelism is used while copying, because
>> each file will be created and filled with data one after another.
>>
>> Bye,
>> Daniel
>>
>>
>
> Cool. Then I can just use cp -a and let her rip. I plan to redo my
> partitions so I will have to reformat the partitions too. I guess this
> will be as good as it gets. I'll also report the results of fragck when
> I get this done. Just curious myself. I think I will skip shake this
> time tho. ;-)
>
> Thanks much.
>
> Dale
--
Miguel Ramos <2...@miguel.ramos.name>
GnuPG ID 0xA006A14C
