General :: Copy A Directory Without It's Contents?
Nov 5, 2009
Is there a way to copy a directory (retaining the permissions and owners) without copying the contents of the directory?
If there is no such thing... then I need a way to determine if a target path is a file or a directory, and if it is a directory I need to make a new directory elsewhere that has the same name, owner and permissions.
Basically, I'm trying write a script to copy 200 GB of files over a network to a new server, and I'd like to do it by generating a list with the find command. That way, I can migrate large chunks of the files over the course of a week, and on the day of the migration generate a new list of files that changed in the last week and then copy just the chagned files over minimizing the down time. However, the list will contain directories that I can't just use the 'cp' command on because it will copy all the contents of the directory.
I would like to copy the contents of a directory into another. I don't want to copy the directory and all files and directories under it, but just the contents of the directory just as if it were a regular file. Doing cp -r target dest copies the directory and the entire hierarchy rooted in it. I get error if I do not include the -r option. (I am calling cp from within a C program.)
I've created other users in my machine. now I want to add all my home directory contents and settings to the home directory of other users. how can i do that? Can I do it from /etc/skel directory?
For reasons I won't get into, I need to copy directories so long as the average system load is low. Can someone help me write a BASH script that will copy the contents of a directory, but check to make sure the average system load is below X before copying each file, and if not, wait Y seconds and try again?
Is there a way to copy a directory without copying the contents, but preserving ownership, timestamp etc of that directory?
I've looked at the cp man page, but I don't think it supports it. I'm thinking one would have to write a script to gather the info, and then mkdir, chown and touch. Does this seam right?
Is there a way to recreate all the folders from one directory to another without copying over the contents of the folder? I've been trying to do something like this,
Code:for i in `ls $X`; do mkdir $PATH/$i; doneUnfortunately $i is deliminated by whitespaces in the filenames and not the actual folders.
$X contains only other folders so I dont have to worry about regular files but any kind of more "advanced" solution would work.
I have a server that I wanted to transfer it to a newer one both of them have CentOS but the newer one kernel is more up to date I wanted to know is it possible just to copy some directory contents exactly to another for transferring the server data (for example /var /usr /bin /home /etc). I have one website on my server with its mysql database
For the life of me I can not figure out what I am doing wrong with scp to copy a directory and its contents from a remote machine to my local host. I have no issues with getting a single file but would like to just save time and get the whole folder in one command.
Here is what I have tried:
scp user AT remoteMachine:/home/username/folderIwant user AT localMachine:/folderIwant this gives me a permission denied error and try again and received disconnect from localHost to many authentication failures
scp user AT remoteMachine:home/username/folderIwant . says can not find file or folder
I am sure this is something easy that I cant remember, and searches gives me local to remote not remote to local and trying to make the local to remote suggestions I read to work remote to local have not worked.
how to copy 3 dir's content to 1 dir by crontab?suppose i want to copy /home/ftp1/* /home/ftp2/* /home/ftp3/* to /ftpdatathree ftp user data to one folder after every one minute by crontab methodso it goes like*/1 * * * * /bin/cp -rf ??? /ftpdata
This is the script I'm running tar tf some.tar somefolder_insidetar And output it's a list with all folders, files, and SUBDIRECTORY Files, the only thing I need it's just show the contents (folder and files) of the current directory choosed, not listing subdirectory files, or subdirectories inside subdirectories.
I have a box with multiple users on it and I want everyone to be able to have full access to their home folders, but not be able to see the contents of /home/ or another user's home folder (I.E. bob has full access to /home/bob but cannot access or even see the contents of /home/john)Right now users can see other user's home folders but can't modify what's inside. How do I prevent them from seeing the contents at all?
I am attempting to use the zip command with the '-x' option to exclude a folder e.g. 'zip upload.zip public_html -x public_html/jquery/*'. However, parts of this folder are still being added to the archive. I made a shell script (saved as 'compress.sh' and ran as '. compress.sh') to do the archiving so I could test adding nested wildards for multiple subfolder levels.
Code:
#!/bin/bash rm -f upload.zip zip -r upload.zip public_html -x public_html/jquery
[code]....
Each new line I added here that has the nested wildcards made the archive file size a bit smaller. Adding more /*'s than this didn't affect the file size. Even after all this though, there were still a couple megabytes of files and folders from the 'jquery' directory that were added to the archive.
Here's some examples of files and folders that were created after I unzipped the archive: public_html/jquery/js/tablesorter/addons/pager/icons [folder] public_html/jquery/js/tablesorter/addons/pager/.svn/entries [file] public_html/jquery/js/tablesorter/build/.svn/text-base/js.jar.svn-base [file]
Why is it that despite all the -x lines, the files and folders like these were still being added to the archive? How can I simply recursively exclude the entire public_html/jquery folder from the archive?
I am in my current directory. I want to copy a directory somewhere else into this current directory. Lets say I want to take it from direc1/direc2 and the directory I want to take is called demo.
Code:
That is what it shows in the man pages, but when I do that, it says cp: no match
When I run "ls -al somedir*" (I use the "ll" shortcut, actually), Linux not only list files that match, but also the contents of directories whose name also happens to match.Is there a way to limit "ls" so that it will only show names (files and directories) and ignore the contents of the directories?
I am using CentOS 5.5 and openSUSE 11.0. I use vim editor but do not know more than 1 - 2% of its functionality. In openSUSE if i open 2 text files in 2 separate terminals, i can copy the contents of one file onto another by just left-clicking and dragging the mouse over the required text. But i am unable to do this in CentOS.
I even threw some video DVDs at it to make sure it wasn't the disc.
Code:
[pickens@acer1 Videos]$ dd if=/dev/sr0 of=POTC.iso dd: reading `/dev/sr0': Input/output error 5088+0 records in
[code]....
I am getting the same thing on my laptop running Mandriva, oddly enough. Two different drives, two different computers, two different distros and multiple DVDs.
I just installed a new HD on my system with multiple HD's already. I have a drive with two versions of Ubuntu & would like to copy the complete drive to the new drive along with all the contents & partitions of the Ubuntu drive.
1 - Could I partition the new drive & just copy the contents using rsync?
2 -If I copy all the contents over could I just reinstall Grub & edit fstab & be good to go?
My system is an Acer Aspire One Happy netbook. It runs Windows 7 OEM. I installed Ubuntu Netbook Remix, which works fine. Unfortunately, I put GRUB in the MBR (I wanted it on Ubuntu partition in order to use Win 7 bootloader). Acer netbooks seem to have a particular MBR (in order to run e-Recovery Management), which is different to the standard Windows 7 MBR.
Moreover, in the internet there are instruction to restore Acer MBR, but they do not seem useful, since I do not find the MBRWRWIN.EXE and RTMBR.BIN files on the hidden partition. Is there a way to tell GRUB to remove itself and restore the previous content of the MBR (something like the old "lilo -u")? Does GRUB make a copy of the content of the MBR before installing itself? Where is it, if it is so?
I am using my media server as my podcast collector. I am in the process of learning the ins and outs of NFS so i can mount a NFS directory and transfer my podcasts from server to player. For now i am using scp to transfer podcasts from server to desktop then to player. The problem is the path to the directory of one of the podcasts is /home/user/gpodder-downloads/The BILL&TIMMY Show Podcast.
whenever i try and run my scp command it fails because it thinks that TIMMY is a script i want to run in the background. I have tried to back-slash escape the character, i've tried single quoting and double quoting the character and i still get the same problem. as it sits now i have to move all podcasts to another directory and then transfer them to my desktop...but i would like to transfer the podcasts without un-necessary steps.
I moved to Mac OS X recently and bumped into the "feature" of Mac where copying files from an external drive resets the file modification/update date/timestamp to the current date (which Windows does not), causing a disaster for my 10+ years of backup work files where date is important. So, before I learned how to avoid that (e.g. using the -p "preserve" flag in the "cp" copy command) I have in the meantime added to my new Mac hard drive many more files as well as updating existing old files.
I have a backup external hard drive with all my old data and proper modification dates. I have a Mac hard drive with reset modification file dates (a single or two particular days). The Mac hard drive has all the "true" and "current" file contents with files modified and added. I need to Copy all the original files from the external harddrive, preserving file metadata (really only modified date), but ONLY overriding the new internal Mac hard drive IF
The file contents (md5 or whatever) is the same or The file was updated after the day (which of course I can see on all files) on which the original disasterous cope was performed (implying the file is new or modified) Ensure the copy leaves all the new and modified files completely intact on the Mac internal hard drive. "No prompting/stopping of the copy of any kind (i.e., not verbose) is required but is o.k". "Recursive copy - obviously I would like to copy all* files folders and subfolders found in export".
I have this scripts that is meant to create certain files and a directory by date and once its finished its meant to copy that direcory an the example ftp server.
I installed a new music application. It reads covers.jpg as the cover of the album, however, my covers files where named album. I dont want to rename, I want to make a copy of album.jpg and if possible as well rename it to covers.jpg. The file has to be in the same folder that it currently is. I have looked around to see how I can do this but have not been able to.
I have a system where the permissions of many files are messed up. I have another system that has the same files, if I put that hard drive in, without simply overwriting the files, is there a way where I can recursively set the permissions of each file to that of this other directory?
