On Thu, 7 Jun 2007 at 9:18am, Matt Hyclak wrote

On Thu, Jun 07, 2007 at 02:11:23PM +0100, Tom Brown enlightened us:

...

Using tar i normally create an archive etc and then unpack that archive, job done.

But i am copying from one filesystem to another on the same host, they are 2 seperate nfs filesystems, and i wonder is it possible to use tar to do this as opposed to say rsync etc.

tar -cvf /some/input/dir to/here etc ?

I believe it goes something like:

cd /some/input/dir tar cvf - . | (cd /to/here; tar xvf -)

Alternately

cd /some/input/dir tar cO . | tar xC /to/here -f -

On Thursday 07 June 2007, Tom Brown wrote:

...

I believe it goes something like:

cd /some/input/dir tar cvf - . | (cd /to/here; tar xvf -)

that is spot on thanks! does it buffer anything in memory do you know or any other temp space? Just wonder as there are a few gigs of data.

add a dd command to the pipe if you want buffers.

That said, my personal opinion is that non-trivial data move operations should not be done with tools like tar, tools that does not allow restart/resume. You mentioned rsync, why not use it.

/Peter

thanks

Matt Hyclak wrote:

On Thu, Jun 07, 2007 at 02:11:23PM +0100, Tom Brown enlightened us:

...

Using tar i normally create an archive etc and then unpack that archive, job done.

But i am copying from one filesystem to another on the same host, they are 2 seperate nfs filesystems, and i wonder is it possible to use tar to do this as opposed to say rsync etc.

tar -cvf /some/input/dir to/here etc ?

I believe it goes something like:

cd /some/input/dir tar cvf - . | (cd /to/here; tar xvf -)

Matt

Or you could think "outside the tar box" and use cpio:

cd /some/input/dir find . | cpio -pmvd /some/destination/dir

"-p" invokes the "passthru" mode, which is great for doing filesystem-to-filesystem copies. cpio seems to have been installed on just about every CentOS, Fedora, and RH system I've used in the last several years. See the manpage for more info!