Difference between cpio copy and tar copy

From: Steven Sim (steven.sim@faplccc.net)
Date: Thu Mar 24 2005 - 06:28:30 EST


Hello Sun Gurus;

 

I recently had to dump almost 100 Gbyte of data from a mounted read only
vxfs volume to a newly formatted ufs mount point.

 

So I used the following command

 

#cd /<source directory>

#find . | cpio -pdmv <target directory>

 

Lo and behold, the above command worked.

 

To a point. It ended after copying about 23 Gbyte of data with the following
messages;

 

.

.

.

/xxyy/qerust/abcdefg.LOG

48581232 blocks

3 error(s)

 

Why did it stop before the whole directory was copied? Surely not because of
the 3 errors! The 3 errors occurred somewhere in the middle of the cpio
operation well before the cpio stopped seemingly gracefully.

 

I had thought cpio was a lot more advanced than a simple cp operation.

 

My colleague subsequently asked me to use the following command

 

#cd /<source directory>

#tar -cf - * | (cd /<target directory>;tar -xf -)

 

Which successfully copied the whole thing.

 

My question is why did cpio not worked properly and which of the above
command is more appropriate for a large copy operation? And which is faster?

 

Warmest Regards
Steven Sim

Service Delivery Manager

Fujitsu Asia Pte Ltd

Company Registration Number 199701545D

20 Science Park Road

#03-01 Teletech Park

Singapore Science Park II

Singapore 117674

Tel: +65-6512-7555

DID: +65-6512-7616

Fax: +65-6512-7600

 

 

Fujitsu Asia Pte. Ltd.
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