Hi,

> The times reported by an ls -l seem to be sane, and of those perms I
> checked, they were preserved ok.  The major hiccup I had was that cp
> doesn't do ".name" files

Of course "cp" does copy dot-files. I think you may have stumbled over 
the shell asterisk.

If you say "cp -rp * /somewhere", the shell expands the "*" to all files 
and dirs in that directory except those beginning with a dot!

Try "echo *" - you get a list of the files in the current directory but 
without the dot files.

You may use "cp * .??*" as a workaround (.??* means all filenames that 
begin with a dot but excludes ".." which would be too much), but that 
won't cover files like ".a" or similar dot-and-one-letter filenames.

The better solution is the indicated "tar cf - ." which takes every file 
in the current directory (excluding the parent dir "..").

> and once went wild and copied the whole 2.5
> gig /root directory into /root/.ymessenger/root when I tried to make
> it do it with a different wild card pattern.

Maybe something like "cp * .*" which also includes ".."? ;-)

> And links definitely weren't a problem that I've run into since the
> drive switch.

Maybe you haven't realized the problem yet. An ordinary "cp" will copy 
the file a symbolic link points to instead of the link. So it can 
happen that your copy becomes larger than the original as you create 
additional copies of files that had symbolic links pointing to them. 
You can run into serious trouble if you have users who use symlinks.

To sum it up: Use tar. :-)

Christopher

-- 
======================================================
    Dipl.-Ing. Christopher Odenbach
    HNI Rechnerbetrieb
    odenbach AT uni-paderborn DOT de
    Tel.: +49 5251 60 6215
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