[SunHELP] moving directories

[Brian Hechinger]

> I know I've seen some tar or cpio commands with some piping that would 
> work.  Since I'm not that proficient, I usually tar up the old directory to 
> a file and untar it to the new directory.  That works fine if you've got 
> the drive space.

cd /dir_to_move_from
tar -cvf - directory_to_move | (cd /directory_to_move_to; tar -xvf -)

the v isn't needed, but let's you see what's going on.  bad over a serial
console link.

> Oh, one gotcha here as well...  I believe it was Solaris 2.6 I got bit with 
> once.  Tar'ing as root would not preserve ownership (or was it mv?)  I 
> found a patch for that however...

if you want to preserve ownership, just add the p flag to tar:

tar -cvpf - directory_to_move | (cd /directory_to_move_to; tar -xvpf -)

make sure you have the correct permissions to do so however (you own everything
involved or you are root)

here's a snippet out of the man page from tar on Solaris 2.x:

     p    Restore the named files to their  original  modes,  and
          ACLs  if  applicable,  ignoring  the  present umask(1).
          This is the default behavior if invoked  as  super-user
          with  the  x function letter specified.  If super-user,
          SETUID and sticky information are also  extracted,  and
          files  are restored with their original owners and per-
          missions, rather than owned by root.  When  this  func-
          tion  modifier  is  used  with the c function, ACLs are
          created in the tarfile along  with  other  information.
          Errors will occur when a tarfile with ACLs is extracted
          by previous versions of tar.

cheers,

-brian