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.