Very Computer

Howdy Dan,
You might find using cpio in pass through mode (-p) a better
alternative. Do a man cpio for the  correct options There was a good
Linux Jounal article on using cpio (check out the Linux Journal site for
previous issues?). If you are not a subscriber I will give them a
plug--great mag.
Good Luck,
Rob
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Rob St. John    

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Hello everyone.

The Short version

Tars defaults options no longer copy everything exactly as it was with
the correct permissions. Various switches do not provide the old
behaviour. Tar is version 1.11.8 from RedHat 4.2

The Long version:

I recently bought a new hard drive.  Of course I wanted to copy my old
linux system to the new drive.
So I tried the old trick from Running Linux tar cf - . | (cd /mnt; tar
xvf -) which is SUPPOSED to copy everything exactly as it was to the new
place.

I did the trick doing a ctrl-z once it got to /mnt otherwise would have
a recursive copy.  I rebooted using my boot floppy to rerun lilo. I then
ran X-windows everything seemed fine. Then I ran netscape it told me my
permissions were wrong. Went to a shell ouch my directory was owned by
root. My files bar a few were owned by root.  Atrun was also complaining
it didn't have permission to write to a directory.

Thank heaven I didn't delete my original partition.

So far tried. The following#
# c to create
# -o to keep original V copy features
# l to stay on same file system i.e. not read other device
# f to create a file
# - to send to standard out
# | to pipe
# cd $1 to the $1 directory
# o to keep original spec
# x to xtract
# v twice to engage more verbose
# f file
# - to extract from standard in
tar -colf - . | (cd $1; tar oxvvf -)

This works for the permissions but when it got to the device directory
it said unrecognised file type
for all the device files and a few others floating around my file
system. At first I thought perhaps it was just the double verbose
running the files through file to provide additiional comments. But in
fact it hadn't copied them at all.

My question is now how do I get tar to work correctly and copy
everything exactly as is to my new hard disc.

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Daniel,
its good to see so many details. You should get some good answers.

Quote:> I did the trick doing a ctrl-z once it got to /mnt otherwise would have
> a recursive copy.

Quote:> Thank heaven I didn't delete my original partition.

Quote:> So far tried. The following#
> # c to create
> # -o to keep original V copy features

Quote:> My question is now how do I get tar to work correctly and copy
> everything exactly as is to my new hard disc.

Another way, these days, is "cp -a", which should have been done years ago.

I hope that helps. Regards,

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:
:I recently bought a new hard drive.  Of course I wanted to copy my old
:linux system to the new drive.
:So I tried the old trick from Running Linux tar cf - . | (cd /mnt; tar
:xvf -) which is SUPPOSED to copy everything exactly as it was to the new
:place.
:
:I did the trick doing a ctrl-z once it got to /mnt otherwise would have
:a recursive copy. [SNIP]

Some recent versions of 'tar' delay setting final ownership and
permissions until the entire archive has been processed.  This avoids
some problems when files and directories in the archive have restrictive
permissions, but it means you have to let 'tar' run to completion to get
everything set properly.  You'll need to find another way to exclude
/mnt.  You can include the name "/mnt" in a "--exclude" file or perhaps
use the "--one-file-system" option.

Yes it's a PITA, especially when I'm just extracting a few files from
the beginning of a lengthy archive that really _is_ on a (slow) tape
drive.

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: Hello everyone.

: The Short version

: Tars defaults options no longer copy everything exactly as it was with
: the correct permissions. Various switches do not provide the old
: behaviour. Tar is version 1.11.8 from RedHat 4.2

: The Long version:

: I recently bought a new hard drive.  Of course I wanted to copy my old
: linux system to the new drive.

I just transferred my entire system to a new hard drive yesterday, the
system consisted of three partitions. I transferred them using 'cp -a'.
Boot from a recovery floppy, mount the partition you want to copy from
(I suggest doing it by booting a system that does not depend on mounting
your hard drive at boot time, so that you will not have trouble with
traversing mount points during the copy... the -x option on my version
of cp does not seem to prevent crossing mount points as I would expect
it to), mount the one you want to copy to, then use 'cp -a (source/*)
(destination)' to do the deed. That does NOT copy any files or
directories in the source directory top level that begin with a '.', so
you should go back and explicitly copy them, also with 'cp -a' once the
copy has completed. Then do the same for any other partitions.

Having done that, it is necessary to fix up a few places that point to
the old partitions (unless the partition names have not changed across
drives): /etc/fstab, /etc/lilo.conf.

so, make a bootable floppy (use dd to copy your booting kernel to a
diskette, then use rdev to tell it the name of root partition on the new
drive AFTER you finish moving drives around. Shut down, move around the
drives to their new configuration then boot it, run lilo to update the
boot loader (based on your newly-revised /etc/lilo.conf). Shut it back
down, remove the diskette and reboot. Voila!
--

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                              who strengthens me.
------------------------------ Philippians 4:13 -------------------------------

(Just curious: Old behavior from where?)

I didn't see in your post any mention of having tried:

-p, --same-permissions, --preserve-permissions
              extract all protection information

Without this flag the permissions on the extracted files will be passed
through your current umask setting, the default on my system is 022
which denies write access to 'other' and 'group'.  You should also
extract as root if any of the files are not owned by you.

So I tried:

tar cvf - .|(cd foo;tar xvvfp -)

And it preserved ownership and permissions correctly.  (But, I also
didn't try the ^Z trick, which has also been noted as a potential
problem.)  When I tried without the 'p' flag, permissions were modified
as noted above.

I also don't know why you would want to use -o in this situation.
Admittedly I don't know the differences between a " V7 format archive"
and a "ANSI format archive", but as long as both tars use the same
format it seems unlikely to make a difference.

-Rob

: The Short version

: Tars defaults options no longer copy everything exactly as it was with
: the correct permissions. Various switches do not provide the old
: behaviour. Tar is version 1.11.8 from RedHat 4.2

Well...
that's actualy nothing new.

The problem is: There does not exist such a thing as a "Default
Configuration" for tar in Linux!

Everybody, who puts together a distribution has a different oppinion,
how things should be.

Get the source, configure it to your liking and compile it yourself!

The other "workaround" would be to put *all* options at the comandline,
so the compiled in "defaults" don't matter.

Regards,
Friedhelm

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The answer is: "NO!"
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Friedhelm Mehnert,  Berliner Allee 42,  22850 Norderstedt,  Germany

-------------------------------------------------------------------

Quote:>So I tried the old trick from Running Linux tar cf - . | (cd /mnt; tar
>xvf -) which is SUPPOSED to copy everything exactly as it was to the new

   1) File ownership and permissions are not set until tar has successfully
completed, meaning that your CTRL-C trick barfs it,
   2) File permissions will have the owner's umask applied to them unless
you explicitly provide the "-p" option to 'tar'.
   3) --exclude can be used to exclude particular files.

So:
  tar --exclude /proc --exclude /mnt -cf - / |  ( cd /mnt ; tar xvpf - )

will do what you are wanting to do.

Or you can use 'cpio', like some other person suggested :-).

--

Systems Specialist               Educational Administration Solutions
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I use to use tar this way to copy files from one place to another, but tar
lacks file hole checking and other features that I wanted. So I wrote a
Backup Copy program...  You may have seen my previous post to this list
about it.

You can download it at:

ftp://mocha.mkintraweb.com/pub/linux/cpbk/

It has great backup features for copying mass files from one place to
another and retainign their perms, mode and device types.  It will also
maintain your backup by removing deleted files from your previous back
that were deleted from the source, aswell as keeping a trash bin for those
delted files.  It also has an exclude option.  All options can be
specified on the command line or from a specified configuration file. Its
faster than cp as well. :)

I currently use it to backup 10 Linux server via NFS on to a Raid device.
Works great so far.

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