Re: Moving Debian from one HD to another

[Zachary DeAquila <zachary@zachs.place.org>]

>Martin Str|mberg wrote:
>
>> Just wanted to warn you that cp copies symbolic links as real files.
>> Thus if you had:
>> 
>> -rw-r-----   1 ms318    erisoft        4 Apr 11 11:07 jjj
>> lrwxrwxrwx   1 ms318    erisoft        3 Apr 11 11:07 kkk -> jjj
>> 
>> in old and did "cp -r old new/" you would get
>> 
>> -rw-r-----   1 ms318    erisoft        4 Apr 11 11:07 jjj
>> -rw-r-----   1 ms318    erisoft        4 Apr 11 11:07 kkk
>> 
>Oops.  Another gotcha.  Is there a flag to cp to preserve links as
>links?  The disadvantage of making a beeg tarfile is that it will take
>up a lot of room, so you need to have 3x(distribution size) available to
>do it that way.

as root, you want to move /old to /new:

cd /old
tar -cvf - . |(cd /new; tar -xvf - )

that makes a tarfile in a pipe so it doesn't have to sit on disk...

 --Zachary