[techtalk] swtiching rhat drives . . .

[Nils Philippsen]

Jeff,

On Tue, 9 Nov 1999, Jeff Dike wrote:

> > I always wonder why people use tar beasts if they have the wonderful
> > GNU cp?
    ^^^
> 
> Because cp will completely foul up device files.  Try copying /dev/mem from 
> one place to another.  You won't like the results :-)

sorry, but I can't stand it if people don't actually try things instead of
repeating false statements:

---8<--- snip ---
root at wombat:/tmp> ls -l /dev/mem
crw-r-----   1 root     kmem       1,   1 May  5  1998 /dev/mem
root at wombat:/tmp> cp -a /dev/mem .
root at wombat:/tmp> ls -l mem
crw-r-----   1 root     kmem       1,   1 May  5  1998 mem
---8<--- snap ---

What you say might apply to several commercial Unix vendors' cp, but not
to any GNU cp I've seen (of course very old ones may differ...).

> > Lean back and enjoy the show... I think this alternative is far less
> > error prone, because people have less to type and actually understand
> > what they do.
> 
> And in all of the normal output, there might be an error that you will
> completely miss.  I like things that shut up unless they have
> something to say that I really need to know about.

Then leave out the -v switch. Some like silence, some not. When copying
whole filesystems one might want to know how long it'll take to finish.
That's where stderr redirection is due.

Nils
-- 
Nils Philippsen / Vogelsangstrasse 115 / D-70197 Stuttgart / +49.711.6599405
nils at wombat.dialup.fht-esslingen.de / nils at fht-esslingen.de / nils at redhat.de
   The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be
   regarded as a criminal offence.                  -- Edsger W. Dijkstra


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