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Re: Using cp - am I doing something stupid?

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Brian Edmonds (brian@gweep.bc.ca)
Wed, 23 Aug 2000 17:09:45 -0700

Alex Harford <alexh@dowco.com> writes:
> I want to copy my / partition to another one. I am doing this by
> typing 'cp -ax / /backup'.

I'm not sure about the problem with the -x flag, but using cp to copy
great gobs of files (particularly devices and such) is almost always a
bad idea. Something more like

# cd /; tar -clf - . | ( cd /backup; tar -xpvf - )

The -l, or --one-file-system, is *supposed* to do what you want, though
I've not personally tested it. Delete the -v in the second call to tar
if you don't want to see each file as it's copied; add another v if you
want to see a ls -l sort of listing of each file as it's copied.

Brian. 

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