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.