Matthew Seaman matthew at
Wed Apr 7 01:23:13 PDT 2004

On Wed, Apr 07, 2004 at 04:06:18AM -0400, Jerry Hatok wrote:

>    I am trying to copy files from a cd I have into my usr directory.  The cd has one directory with a lot of subdirectories and files.  Is there a command that I can copy everything at once? If so what is it?  If not what would you suggest being the fastest way to copy everything?

There's many, many ways of doing this sort of thing under Unix.
Assuming that your CD Rom is mounted under /cdrom and you want to copy
everything onto /home/jerry/cdimage then:

    % cd /cdrom
    % mkdir /home/jerry/cdimage
    % tar -cvf - . | ( cd /home/jerry/cdimage ; tar -xvpf - )

However there are any number of commands you could substitute for that
3rd line:

    % find . -depth -print | cpio -pdmu /home/jerry/cdimage

or, if you're installed the net/rsync port:

    % rsync -avx --delete /cdrom/ /home/jerry/cdimage/

That last one is particularly good if you've already got a partial
copy in the destination directory, as it will avoid copying stuff it
doesn't need to, and it will remove stuff under the destination not
present in the source.

None of these will be particularly faster than any of the others if
you're copying from scratch -- the limiting factor should be the IO
bandwidth of your hardware.



Dr Matthew J Seaman MA, D.Phil.                       26 The Paddocks
                                                      Savill Way
PGP:         Marlow
Tel: +44 1628 476614                                  Bucks., SL7 1TH UK
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