[PATCH] adding two new options to 'cp'

[Rick C. Petty]

On Tue, Aug 01, 2006 at 02:26:28PM -0400, Mike Meyer wrote:
> In <20060801171150.GB3413 at megan.kiwi-computer.com>, Rick C. Petty <rick-freebsd at kiwi-computer.com> typed:
> 
> > Obviously, I didn't add the error checking/handling, but AFAIK this is
> > essentially what the -S option to gnu's tar does.
> 
> Yes, but gnu tar doesn't do this accurately,

That may be.  I haven't looked at their code, I just assumed how they did
it.

> so you're not doing what
> Peter said you couldn't do. You are doing what Ivan asked, though.

That depends upon what you mean by "accurately" and what you mean by
"sparse".  :-P  Yes, if you're looking for a block-wise "dump" of a file
system's file, you use dump.  If you're looking to make a "copy" of a file,
optimizing for sparseness, you use rsync.  A pretty heavyweight solution
when you're trying to copy one file.

> I always think of cp as a tool for making *copies of files*, not for
> creating an archive of a directory tree. We've got lots of tools that
> do the latter. Do we really need another one?

I wasn't thinking of the "sparse handling" utility for whole trees, but it
would be useful for that also.  I'm just looking for a lightweight tool
for copying files containing sparse chunks..  Since we switched to bsdtar,
the base system has been lacking this feature.  To me, this seems more
useful (as a base feature) than hard-linking trees.  But both have utility.

-- Rick C. Petty