On Jun 26, 2007, at 21:03, Robert Moskowitz wrote: > 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.... Sounds like the perfect job for rsync. You probably want to use the - a option. Check out the man page and test on a different directory until you get the directory hierarchy just right. Alfred