Recently installed slackware 11.0, using 2.6 kernel, which includes the /proc pseudo-filesystem. I use cp for simple backup to a removable drive, but cp hangs on /proc/kmsg. (It also takes a long time on /proc/kcore, hopefully it sees it as a sparse file.) Is there some way to make cp skip /proc (there's no documented option I can find)? I guess I could turn off /proc altogether but supposedly some programs in the distribution use it.

Why would you need a backup of anything outside /home? Much of the system will be best rebuilt with a re-install from the CDs/DVD.

But to answer your question, if you want to do things that way, you'd probably be best off specifying particular directories in your script as opposed to a simple "cp -r / $TARGET".

There are other pseudo filesystems for which backups are not necessary. Eg: /sys & /dev. Also, you may not need/want to backup anything under /mnt, /media or /tmp.

I'd suggest something like this:

There are probably quicker & neater ways of doing this using xargs and some regexp... but this would do for me.

After spending 3 days hacking various system files to get the radeon driver to work using dri, not to mention the ide bus to work at full speed (I think), I think I'd rather just abandon Linux rather than have to re-install from the CDs.

But thanks for suggestions. I thought I vaguely remembered that there was some cp-like utility that would skip directories containing a certain filename, or something like that...