Copying files
 

Anyone have any idea of an easy way to do this.

A few months ago I copied about 20 GB's of files into a shared directory on another pc. I want to do the same again but I don't want to waste time copying existing files, just want to get the new/changed ones. I can do the copy easily with the cp command but I need some way of automatically saying no when it asks if I want to overwrite. Can't find any option in the man pages.

Any ideas?

Paddy

The cp command doesn't ask you you to overwrite unless you passed the -i option (interactive). So I guess that you have an alias that includes this option automatically.
So you can either remove this alias, or you can just type /bin/cp instead of cp.

Thats interesting never noticed that! So what does it do by default if the file already exists?

Paddy

It overwrites the file by default.
By the way, you can view all your 'aliases' by typing alias in a command prompt. You should notice this line : alias cp = 'cp -i'.
Edit : Just forgot to say, if you want to remove an alias, type in a command prompt : "unalias cp"

Thanks for the info. I think I'll try and use dump to do a proper backup, might be better in the long run.

Paddy

easy and steady
 

rsync is a program that behaves in much the same way that rcp does, but has many more options and uses the rsync remote-update protocol to greatly speed up file transfers when the destination file already exists.

The rsync remote-update protocol allows rsync to transfer just the differences between two sets of files across the network link, using an efficient checksum-search algorithm described in the technical report that accompanies this package.

use rsync to do incremental backup:

rsync -av --log-file=/var/log/myrsync.log /media/source_dir /media/destionation_dir

Paddy is unlikely to answer

Last Activity: 2007-01-14 21:46


This thread was started:- 2005-07-04
and until yesterday the last post was 2005-07-04

But yes, rsync is the perfect utility for such things

wow..hmm..good catch Firerat

Hope this will help someone along the way :)

He he blast from the past ;-)

rsync is the way to go, or if you want something more interactive unison-gtk is good, it's based on rsync.

Now... I didn't expect that :)