copying directories

[jc at trillian.mit.edu (John Chambers)]

| cp -r -p <src> <dest>  to copy recursively and preserves file
| attributes.

One thing missing from  this  is  that  novices  are  usually  rather
surprised  and  disappointed  that,  if  <src>  is  a directory, this
doesn't  make  <dest>  a  copy  of  <src>.   Rather,  it  creates   a
subdirectory  of  <dest>  named  the same as <src> and puts the files
there.  This is almost always not what was expected.  There has never
been  a  simple  way  to  get  the unix cp command to simply copy one
directory to another.

For example, if you try "cp -rp foo bar" and bar  is  already  a  bar
directory,  you  find  that  there's  now a bar/foo directory, and it
contains copies of the files in foo.  That's not what you wanted,  so
you  try  "cp -rp foo/* bar", and find that it almost works, but none
of the hidden files are copied.  So next you try to get those  copied
by  "cp  -rp  foo/*  foo/.* bar", and what this does is copies all of
foo/..  into bar.  Oops...

The cleanest way to make <dest> into a copy of <src> is with a tar or
cpio command.  For example:

	tar cf - <src> | (cd <dest>; tar xpf -)
or
	find <src> -print | cpio -pdum <dst>

(This was taken from a BSD man pages.  For some reason, the linux man
pages for tar and cpio give no examples.  Neither do the "info" docs.
I'm not really impressed here.  This is really not excusable for such
complex commands.  ;-)

--
What if the Hoky Poky really IS what it's all about?