[LBo] Moving /home

[Anita Lewis]

On 04/01/2007 07:03 PM TerryJ wrote:
> Anita Lewis wrote:

>>
>> My understanding is <snip>
>> I would expect <snip>
>> Anyone know more on this?

> =

> Statements like "I understand" and "I would expect" make me nervous.  No
> criticism intended because that's all I get out of so many man pages and
> other Linux "howtos".  =


Maybe this will be better.  At least, I would expect that it would.
Oops, I did it again.

Ok, I'll confess.  I was trying to find some way to post a test message
to the list and this was the best I could do.  The test worked, btw.

Since then with the aid of the Sunday Linux chat, I have found a bit
more about this question of what the '-x' in 'cp -ax' actually means.

My current understanding after testing it; so I actually can say that I
know it to be true is in this example:

# cp -ax /var /home/var

-a will keep owner=92s rights, symlinks, and will do the copy recursively.

-x will cause it to not copy subdirectories in /var which are not
actually on the same partition/filesystem as /var. The mountpoints will
be copied but not the data within mounted partitions.

Let's say you have a directory in /var named /var/bigfiles and it has
some movies in it.  Let's say that '/var/bigfiles' is actually a
mountpoint for another partition, currently mounted.  The -x in the cp
command above will cause you to have /home/var/bigfiles after the copy,
but there will be no files in it.  That is what the manpage means when
it says "stay on this file system."  That would also include any virtual
filesystems like /proc if you were trying to copy '/', the root directory.

Anita

PS: all you openpgp signers, watch out for my original post in this
thread, because it is utf-8 and will do nasty things in the digest and
archives.



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