rsync -a is not the same as cp -R [LWN.net]

rsync -a is not the same as cp -R

Posted Nov 6, 2020 8:06 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
In reply to: rsync -a is not the same as cp -R by mchehab
Parent article: Deprecating scp

My photographs directory (large files, 24MP raw) is heavily sym-linked. Does -a retain hard symlinks - I believe not. Copying that directory could well cause a "disk full" on the destination, too ...

Cheers,
Wol

rsync -a is not the same as cp -R

Posted Nov 7, 2020 23:22 UTC (Sat) by Sesse (subscriber, #53779) [Link] (1 responses)

FWIW, links in UNIX are either hard (hardlinks) or symbolic (symlinks). There's no such thing as “hard symlinks”.

rsync -a is not the same as cp -R

Posted Nov 8, 2020 0:03 UTC (Sun) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

Whoops :-)

I meant, of course, hard links.

Oh - and if you don't need to preserve hard links (which I do), it's not a good idea to try. I think my rsync or cp crawled, I had so many it needed to keep track of ...

Cheers,
Wol