Copying /dev/* to another partition

[John Lawitzke]

>From article <2538 at tuminfo1.lan.informatik.tu-muenchen.dbp.de>, by k2 at charly.bl.physik.tu-muenchen.de (Klaus Steinberger):
$ rtidd at mwunix.mitre.org (Randall Tidd) writes:
$>I am trying to clone my root partition to a backup partition (just
$>root and subdirectories, but *not* other partitions such as /usr,
$>/home, etc).  I ran into a problem when trying to copy /dev; when I
$>try to cp /dev/sd0a (for example), it will try to read from the device
$>/dev/sd0a rather than copy the actual file /dev/sd0a.
$ 
$ Use cpio or tar for this purpose. That's the way to do it.

Under SCO Xenix and SCO UNIX, tar does not copy empty directories or
device nodes.

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