Copy a Directory from Command Line
Copying a directory for the sake of backup is something I do often, especially when I'm trying to figure out why something isn't working when I use an external library. I'll copy the directory structure as a backup, mess around with the original source until I find a solution, then restore the original and change my overall system code to bring in my revised version.
You can't just use cp to copy a directory structure -- you'll see cp: myDir is a directory (not copied). You'll need to add a few additional flags to copy a directory structure:
cp -Rp source source_copy
The above command copies the directory recursively while keeping the same permissions!
![CSS @supports]()
Feature detection via JavaScript is a client side best practice and for all the right reasons, but unfortunately that same functionality hasn't been available within CSS. What we end up doing is repeating the same properties multiple times with each browser prefix. Yuck. Another thing we...
![How I Stopped WordPress Comment Spam]()
I love almost every part of being a tech blogger: learning, preaching, bantering, researching. The one part about blogging that I absolutely loathe: dealing with SPAM comments. For the past two years, my blog has registered 8,000+ SPAM comments per day. PER DAY. Bloating my database...
![Styling CSS Print Page Breaks]()
It's important to construct your websites in a fashion that lends well to print. I use a page-break CSS class on my websites to tell the browser to insert a page break at strategic points on the page. During the development of my...
![MooTools 1.3 Browser Object]()
MooTools 1.3 was just released and one of the big additions is the Browser object. The Browser object is very helpful in that not only do you get information about browser type and browser versions, you can gain information about the user's OS, browser plugins, and...
Why do you have the
-sflag in there? Looking at the--helpforcp, that’s the option to “make symbolic links instead of copying”, and according to Stack Overflow http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1240636 , that doesn’t even work recursively (with the-Rflag). (Nor can I see why you would want to copy an entire directory recursively only for it to be populated with symlinks, especially “for the sake of backup”.) Typo?EDIT: David has since corrected the error in question.
Another great option that I somehow always forget to use is -a (archive), used like so:
It copies structure and permissions and also preserves symlinks.
Just use rsync, faster and more options. )
Good to know. But I agree with @John
I prefer to use rsync for this purpose