Shell Programming and Scripting

what different between two instruction
cp -r
rcp -r

"cp"=copy, "rcp"=remote copy. Does that answer your question?


you have to copy it somewhere. This "somewhere" will be included in "cp -r"s scope because "cp -r" works recursively. If you don't take extra care and simply issue

Code:

cp -r / /somehwere

cp will first copy everything to "/somewhere", then create a copy of "/somewhere" in "/somewhere/somewhere", then create a copy of "/somewhere/somewhere" in "/somewhere/somewhere/somewhere", ... It will create an infinite recursion until at some point it will simply exhaust the disk space. This is probably not what you had in mind when you issued the command.

Either use "rcp", because the destionation will be on another machine and therefore not interfere or use "tar" and a special file mask so that the resulting tar-file is not included in "tar"s scope - or something similar. In general: avoid the recursion leading to the destination being included in the target.

I hope this helps.

bakunin