[plug] tar vs cp -r

[Craig Ringer]

On Thu, 2005-03-10 at 14:51 +0800, Jim Householder wrote:
> Hi
> 
> On a number of occasions I have seen a preference shown for using tar to 
> move large trees rather than cp -r.

In addition to the points made by others, tar works well over ssh (so
long as you use no-pty, as I found out) and can be *dramatically* faster
than using `scp -r'.

It's also possible to pipe a list of files to be copied, generated by,
eg, `find', into tar (or at least star) or add restrictions like files
modified after a certain date. `cp -r' isn't really all that smart.

For just straight copies, cp -aR should do the job nicely. More complex
tasks can benefit from using an archiver (like tar, star, pax, etc) or
special tool like rsync or unison.

--
Craig Ringer