"copy" the entire directories structure from another server

[Hanry Zhou]

I have a directory structure, and total of 6 level of sub-directories underneath the top directory, each level of sub-diretory also has mulitiple subdirectories.

Now, I want to "copy" (create) the entire structure over to another system. Is there any script I can use or any more automatic way I can use to achieve that? instead of manually creating each one of them?

Thanks,

[Navin Bhat_2]

You can do a "cp -r .." or you can tar the entire directory structure and untar it.

[Sanjay_6]

Hi,

If possible you can create a tar archive on one system and then take it to the other system and extract it. This gets everything. Or you can do rcp -r if using rcp.

There are other choices too, but it depends on how much data are we talking about and what choices we have.

Hope this helps.

Regds

[harry d brown jr]

cd /mainDIR (on local machine)
rcp -rp ./sourceDIR othermachine:/mainDIR

Make sure your "othermachine" has a ".rhosts" file under your login. Which means you need a login on both machines!

live free or die
harry

[Navin Bhat_2]

sorry I miss typed.. should have been rcp -r not cp -r. - Thx

[Siddhartha M]

If you are planning on doing this copying regularly you could also consider using "rdist".
Please check the man page rdist(1) for more details on directory synchronization.

-Siddhartha

[Marvin Strong]

Also if you want ownership and permissions to be identical, that may not happen with cp or rcp. But tar or cpio will retain all permissions.

tar and ftp it.
setup rhosts and use either tar or cpio across the network.

use nfs to mount it then copy it with tar or cpio.

you can try cp -p -r but you may still lose ownership of files.

[Geoff Wild]

If I understand you, you just want the directory structure - not the contents...

On the server with the current structure:

find /yourmountpoint -type d -print >/tmp/dir.list

then copy that to new server...

then on new server:

for i in `cat /tmp/dir.list`
do
mkdir -p $i
done

Rgds...Geoff

[Scott J. Showalter]

Do you by any chance have Legato Networker?

If so, there is a real nice utility called uasm that is suited perfectly for this. If you do use Legato, I will post the specifics to the command, no use in posting the specifics if not.

[Rodney Hills]

Any time I copy a directory from one server to another, I compress the data. This way large directories use less band width on the network (and copy faster). Example-

cd /fromdir
tar cf - . | compress -c | ssh otherhost "zcat - | ( cd /to_dir ; tar xf - )"

HTH

-- Rod Hills

[Robert-Jan Goossens · Accepted solution]

Hi,

How about find in combination with cpio.
Only the directory structure will be created.

# find /source -type d | cpio -ov | remsh server " cd /copy ; cpio -idvum "

Regards,
Robert-Jan