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Move files around local filesystem with tar without wasting space using an intermediate tarball.

Terminal - Move files around local filesystem with tar without wasting space using an intermediate tarball.
( cd SOURCEDIR && tar cf - . ) | (cd DESTDIR && tar xvpf - )
2009-06-26 19:13:51
User: res0nat0r
Functions: cd tar
6
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Move files around local filesystem with tar without wasting space using an intermediate tarball.
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Alternatives

There are 3 alternatives - vote for the best!

Terminal - Alternatives
tar -C <source> -cf - . | tar -C <destination> -xf -
2009-07-10 21:16:23
User: Tekhne
Functions: tar
Tags: files
-2
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Move files around local filesystem with tar without wasting space using an intermediate tarball.
Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious
tar -C <source_dir> -cf . | tar -C <dest_dir> -xf -
2009-07-08 22:20:45
User: Tekhne
Functions: tar
Tags: files
-3
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Move files around local filesystem with tar without wasting space using an intermediate tarball.
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious
tar -C <source_dir> -cf . | tar -C <dest_dir> -xf
2009-07-08 22:19:04
User: Tekhne
Functions: tar
Tags: files
-4
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Move files around local filesystem with tar without wasting space using an intermediate tarball.
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious

Know a better way?

If you can do better, submit your command here.

What others think

Why would you do this as opposed to cp -r? Is this faster? I'm too lazy to try it out...

Comment by blue_beastie 32 weeks and 3 days ago

Well, for starters it preserves ownership, mode, timestamps, and links. Then again, so does cp -a, so I really don't know.

Comment by TheMightyBuzzard 32 weeks and 3 days ago

cp's -a switch does --recursive, --preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps,links and --no-dereference

I fail to see the point in using tar like this. Anyone? It'd make more sense if the extract command was an arg to ssh, to happen on a remote machine, and tar was set to compress the data.

Comment by tremby 32 weeks and 2 days ago

Depending on where the source and destinations live (same partition, same disk, same machine) this approach can have merit sometimes because it introduces a buffering via the pipe and the reading and writing are driven by two different tar processes rather than a single cp process. If it is faster that way, I think that would be why.

However, on the same machine I don't think this is likely to be faster, but I have definitely verified that when copying files between machines in this way (via putting an ssh user@host in front of either cmd) can be way faster than a single scp command, due to the buffering.

Comment by bwoodacre 32 weeks and 1 day ago

Oh, the old classic ;-)

Comment by oernii2 32 weeks and 1 day ago

That way more reliable when using nfs. I didn't believe it, but it happened to me that on some systems (tru64, aix, solaris) cp-ing tonns of files to nfs3 fails while tar | tar - works smoothly...

Anyway it could be that on newer release of nfs those issues won't arise.. but if you want to be sure...tar is for free :P

Comment by ioggstream 32 weeks ago

Your point of view

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