SCO

This advice is general because I haven't seen SCO unix for many years.

Reading between the lines you appear to be trying to move an existing running SCO unix system to a virtual machine. You have already hit the 2 Gb limit on any file (including a cpio archive) which is found in old versions of unix.

Personally I wouldn't attempt to move the Operating System. I would cold install on the new platform and then transfer any data files. Assuming you have a technique to boot the result (a technique unknown to me), copying all the files is straightforward providing that the destination filesystem can be handled by the source Operating System.

Try using "find ." piped to "cpio -p". This is documented in both "man find" and "man cpio". The key point here is that we are not creating a "cpio archive" (which could exceed 2 Gb) we are just copying files (none of which could possibly exceed 2 Gb). It is what "cpio" is for.

Sample example command sequence follows: Please check exact syntax on your computer with your "man" pages and do rehearse on expendable filesystems. I recall that the parameter "-xdev" used to be "-mount" in SCO unix but things have probably changed in the meantime.

You cannot move all filesystems in one operation. It needs one copy operation per filesystem. Start with root then each mountpoint in descending order of directory hirearchy. Ensure that the target filesystems match the source filesystems.

Code:

cd /old_mountpoint
find . -xdev -depth -print | cpio -pdumv /mnt/new_mountpoint

Thx a lot, but on the physical machine I have in /usr/local/bin just symbolic links.
And cpio -pdumv will copy symbolic links as well?