On Tue, Apr 13, 2010, Tom Rosenfeld wrote about "Re: faster rsync of huge directories": > > By the way, while "cpio -p" is indeed a good historic tool, nowadays there > > is little reason to use it, because GNU's "cp" make it easier to do almost > > everything that cpio -p did: The "-a" option to cp is recursive and copies >... > While we are on the topic, I use cpio because I am also "historic" :-) In > the past I had to do similar copies on diff versions of *NIX (even before > rsync was invented!)
That's ok, because I am also "historic" :-) which explains why I even heard of cpio (nowadays the only people who are likely to have even heard this name are developers of RPM tools...). In the late 80's, I used cpio extensively for transferring files across the atlantic on... diskettes. I even remember one day when I arrived with a corrupt diskette, and had to modify the cpio source code to skip over errors in the file. That day I learned three lessons: 1. That open source rules, 2. That cpio sucks as a backup format (because it has no error recovery capabilities) and that there must be a better file transfer protocol than diskettes ;-) Soon afterwards, I learned about tar and GNU cp. I haven't used cpio since... > and after much testing of issues of hard links, sym links, timestamps, etc I > found cpio to be the most portable tool. I guess when I get a chance I will > test 'cp -au' I just checked, and "cp -a" does seem to copy hard-linked files in a directory correctly (i.e., the destination files are also hard-linked). I never checked, though, if it can do more complicated hard-link copying. Frankly, I don't really care - I stopped using hard links around the same time I stopped using cpio. They were really important before the advent of symbolic links (in System V release 4, if I recall correctly), but nowadays they are more often confusing than useful - at least in my opinion. -- Nadav Har'El | Tuesday, Apr 13 2010, 30 Nisan 5770 n...@math.technion.ac.il |----------------------------------------- Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |You do not need a parachute to skydive. http://nadav.harel.org.il |You only need one to skydive twice. _______________________________________________ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
