Re: cp -u

[Philip Rowlands]

On Sat, 14 Jun 2008, Markku A. Mähönen wrote:

> I noticed that if, for some reason, the copy of a file is interrupted 
> (and so the destination file is not the same size as the source) and 
> after that you do 'cp -u' again it does not update the interrupted 
> file. So the 'cp -u' does not care about the file size mismatch and 
> cares only about the timestamps.
>
> So I would like to suggest that 'cp -u' should also check the size of 
> the files and do a copy if source is newer, or if destination is 
> missing, or if file sizes are different.

You might find rsync to be a better tool for this task. It's more robust 
against partial-copy failures, and has the nice property that copied 
files will all carry the same mtime, whereas cp -u will not attempt to 
replicate timestamps (from a cursory check).


Cheers,
Phil