moving /var/mail to another machine

Lisa Casey lisa at jellico.com
Tue May 24 16:25:19 PDT 2005


Hi,

I want to move all of the mailboxes (all of /var/mail/*) on one machine to 
another one across a network. I need to preserve permissions, uid's and 
gud's. (It would probably be good to preserve modification times as well). I 
can move a file using scp, but it doesn't preserve uid/gid

I found this page:  http://www.unixguide.net/ibm/faq/faq1.604.shtml  which 
says I can do either:

$rsh RemoteHost "cd TargetDir; tar -cBf - ." | tar -xvBf -

or

rcp -rp host1:/dir host2:/dir

I'm trying it using a users home directory first just to make sure I can get 
this right, but so far I'm not having much luck.

Could someone here suggest the best way for me to move these mailboxes (and 
perhaps help me out a little with the actual syntax of the command I would 
use)?

I realise that there will be a problem with mailboxes that don't have 
usernames on the remote system (the system I'm copying the mailboxes to) but 
most of the users currently exist on the remote system, it will be easy 
enough to do a adduser to add in those that aren't already on there.

I hope I'm explaining myself clearly here, it's been a long day already  :-)

Thanks,

Lisa

 



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