[CentOS] Re: Opposite of cp -u

[Greg Bailey]

Robert Moskowitz wrote:
> Scott Silva wrote:
>> Robert Moskowitz spake the following on 8/6/2007 2:40 PM:
>>  
>>> I had at one point copied a large number of files between drives and 
>>> did
>>> not use the -p and thus the timestamps were all set to the date of the
>>> copy.
>>>
>>> I did not catch this, and deleted the source.  So I 'lived' with it and
>>> have since changed many files.
>>>
>>> Well, yesterday I found a good backup of many of those files and I want
>>> to restore them to their proper dates.
>>>
>>> cp -p -u is exactly the opposite of what I want.  I want to copy 
>>> only if
>>> the source files have an earlier date than the destination files.
>>>
>>> The source files are just an old copy on another drive that I found 
>>> when
>>> cleaning up things...
>>>     
>> Can you restore the backups, and then cp -u from the existing 
>> directory over
>> the restored copy?
> No.  Because all the files, changed or not since that date, are newer 
> than what is on the backup.  So it would overwrite everything.
>


Maybe you could iterate through the file directories on your good backup 
and do a "touch -r" on the current set using the timestamps from the 
good backup:

foreach file in backup_dir:
   if file exists in current_dir:
      touch -r backup_dir/file current_dir/file

or something like that...

-Greg