When I built this new Centos 5 drive, I copied over much of my old data using cp, and did not use the -preserve option. Ouch. I need those file create dates so that documents and such sort properly, historically. I recovered much of my stuff from a tar built back in mid-May (but I missed that the tar backup ended abnormally, as I was tar-ing to a USB attached drive formatted FAT32, and at 4Gb, it stopped). Now I want to copy all of my newer files into this recovered directory. The -u option of cp and mv will do the wrong thing, of course. I want to only copy files that are NOT present in the recovered directory. I will of course still be stuck with a lot of files with a Jun 18 date that were created between the backup date and Jun 18, but at least I will be better off.... Perhaps I do a mv -f from the recovered to the misdated directory? Being careful to protect those few files that HAVE really been modified since the backup? Oh, I am talking about 30k files here.....