Re: rate limit in copy.c

[Bob Proulx]

It looks like your mailer sent out two identical copies of your
message.  I see that you are subscribed so I won't CC you.

maurizio panniello wrote:
> I made a little modification to copy.c and cp.c to
> implement in cp the specification of a precise
> transfer rate coping normal files.

Thanks for sharing your patch with the mailing list.  It is most
appreciated when people show and share their code.

> It is used as:
> 
> cp infiles outfiles --rate NBYTESPERSECOND

Are you familiar with rsync?  It is installed by default on most systems.

  http://rsync.samba.org

Check out the --bwlimit option.

  rsync --help

       --bwlimit=KBPS          limit I/O bandwidth; KBytes per second

> I need this to don't overload my server copying lots
> of files between filesystems. I know i can do this in
> other manners (a pipe) but i think is very usefull to
> have this directly in cp command directly.

The core utilities such as cp, mv, rm, are required utilities on /bin
on all systems.  Therefore extra care needs to be taken that they
don't become too overgrown.  It reduces their ability to be useful on
a wide range of platforms.  Already there are other small programs
such as busybox which implies that the core utilities are too bloated
already.  And if this functionality were added to cp it would imply
that other commands such as mv also needed the same functionality
added to them as well multiplying the problem.

I would prefer not to see this type of functionality added to the
utils.  Especially since the same type of functionality already exists
in the 'rsync' command.  The 'rsync' command provides a wide range of
additional functionality such as this over the 'cp' command.  The two
commands compliment each other very nicely.

Bob