[SWLUG] Backing up took 3 days

[James]

Steve Hill wrote:

> On Mon, 5 Dec 2005, Neil Greenwood wrote:
>
>> Using ".*" in a directory sometimes includes "." and ".." in the list of
>> files to process. And doing it recursively, it includes the whole 
>> directory
>> tree starting from "/".
>
>
> It shouldn't go all the way back to / - it'll just grab the parent 
> directory (and it's children).
>
> A useful shell glob to grab all the dot files is .[^.]* (it's not 
> quite complete since it won't get files starting with "..", but close 
> enough for most uses)
>
True - it went up a directory, and copied everything from the parent 
directory aswell. Didn't notice that before - thanks for pointing it out.

Someones also told me that the choice of flags are unusual, specifically 
the 'f' flag - "force file to be copied if the destination file cannot 
be opened" - that to me sounded like "if the destination file is 
corrupt, retry". Am I wrong in thinking like that? I read through the 
man pages but could not find what was wrong with the command.

I was also told that the cp command should copy all files which the ln 
command will see, with the same parameters. For example:

ln -R /home/james/*

Lists everything in my home directory, but:

cp -fvr /home/james/*

ignored anything beginning with a dot.