On Fri, 2006-01-13 at 01:50, Parameshwara Bhat wrote: > I want to copy /usr to a new partition and then attach that at /usr. I > issued a command > > cp -options(recursive included) /usr /mnt/"mountpoint > > This resulted in the creation of a new "usr" directory under > /mnt/"mountpoint"/usr and contents of /usr went into sub-directories. What > I want is to copy all the subdirectories and files directly under /usr to > go at /mnt/"mountpoint" for obvious reasons. How do I do that? "Man cp" > did not give me any clue. I usually cd into the directory to be copied and use "." as the source: cd /usr cp -a . /mnt/mntpoint/usr since that eliminates the question of whether it will create a new directory under what you specify. Cp -a will take all the normal unix attributes (owner, modes, etc.) but not acls or the extended attributes for SELinux. If you need those, I think the current version of dump |restore is supposed to get them, at least on ext3 filesystems. > Also, is there a command which compares each file under two directory > trees for difference.(I want to verify after the above operation) Rsync will work - and it can be used for the copy as well although it consumes a bit more memory than cp. cd /usr rsync -av . /mnt/mntpoint/usr if you repeat the rsync command it will check and update anything that doesn't match. If you add -n it won't actually do the copy but because of the -v it will report the filenames that would be changed if you hadn't used -n. -- Les Mikesell lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
