I wonder if many of you use KMail on KDE 3.0. It uses a different format of saving mail in your ~/Mail/inbox/ directory. All the mail files are individually saved in files with names like "341900434FJ:S,2"

Because of a terrible failure in the boot-up process, I need to save all my mail files onto floppy (the only backup media I have available to me. ) However, the "cp" command won't work, possibly because of the commas in the filenames?

I tried tarring the entire directory but it complained because my filesystem was read-only at the time and I don't know if tar creates any temp files before moving the archive to the destination. Does anyone have any ideas how I can move my files to floppy before reinstalling my corrupted system?

jin

Have you tried quoting the filenames? ie:
cp "341900434FJ:S,2" /somewhere/else

I've moved my mail files from partition to partition and not had problems.

tar clfv - . |( cd /floppy; tar xpf - --same-owner)
to copy them or
tar clfvz - . > /floppy/filename.tgz
from in mail directory

or tar clfvz - /path/to/kmail/directory/ > /pathtofloppy/mail.tgz