fs copy follies -- embarrassment and more GRRRR!!!!

[Curtis Jackson]

First the embarrassment:  Due to my SA and myself relying on our faulty
human memories rather than looking in the manual (RTFM, you know), we
managed to move the swap area up one slice on the same drive rather than
up one slice \and/ over to another drive.  Thus, my problems were primarily
caused by the fact that I was attempting to cpio/dcopy over my swap area.
This is not recommended, believe me.

As for the GRRRRR!!:  I was told to try 'tar', which sounded like a reasonable
alternative after I tried cpio again (post-swap-follies) and it legitimately
ran out of memory to store link info, and I tried dcopy with a bigger size
and it trashed the filesystem.  So I tried tar, which silently sat there
and scrogged my 'ps's for the rest of the day -- a 'ps -ef' revealed all
sorts of processes that had CPU times of -4328364:34 and command names
from netnews articles like [ duke.UUCP (].  Everything on the system worked
OK, but ps reported all sorts of these nonexistent twilight zone processes
and nothing was actually being tar'd.  I started doing some tests, not being
familiar with tar, and found that if tar had to copy even one linked file
it freaked out completely.  More testing (about an hours worth by now)
revealed that tar was quite happy with linked files IF all the subdirectories
under the destination were already present.  This is NOT in the documentation
ANYWHERE that I found.  So, I try:

cd /src; find . -type d -print | cpio -pdcam /dest
tar cf - . | (cd /dest; tar xf -)

AND IT WORKED!!!!

Thanks for all your responses so quickly -- it was one of them that suggested
tar to me and helped me solve this dilema.
-- 

The MAD Programmer -- 919-228-3313 (Cornet 291)
alias: Curtis Jackson	...![ ihnp4 ulysses cbosgd mgnetp ]!burl!rcj
			...![ ihnp4 cbosgd akgua masscomp ]!clyde!rcj