On Wednesday, 30th March 2005, Garrett Wollman wrote: ><<On Wed, 30 Mar 2005 21:39:22 +1000, Stephen McKay <smckay_at_internode.on.net> said: > >> Tar is indeed a most excellent program for copying directory trees, since >> even in this modern century cp fails to correctly handle hard links. Sigh. > >I believe the record will show that `cp' handles hard links correctly >according to the specification; that's simply not the behavior you >want. (In POSIX one would use `pax -rw' for that.) Have you had a blood transfusion from a lawyer recently? How else could you be so literal? :-) It's obvious that "cp" has split hard links for all its life because the original programmer was lazy. That this laziness has been codified in POSIX is not something to be cheered, although at this late stage it may be too hard to fix. I want the normal utility for copying files and directories to copy them exactly, not approximately. I've been using the "tar|tar" trick since the mid 80's (and it works perfectly), but I groan inwardly every time. Using pax instead of tar because cp doesn't work properly is still a hack, though since it is less typing it may be worth investigating. Stephen.Received on Wed Mar 30 2005 - 23:49:16 UTC
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