UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

There is no distinction between moving a file or a directory. On the same filesystem it involves updating some inodes: the parent directories from where what-you-are-moving came from, and the one for the parent directory where-you-are-moving-it-to. Neither of these affect the information in the "thing" you are moving.

Even across filesystems the last modification timestamp of a directory is not modified.

This is on an NFS drive which is shared, so I can access it from RH5, Sun, HP, AIX, operating systems. On any of them, then I mv a folder into another folder, the original folder's modify time is changed to sysdate. The contents of the folder are not changed, but the folder itself is...

Use "find" piped to "cpio -p". This is described in both "man find" and "man cpio". I can't go deeper because we do not know what Operating System version or Shell you have.
Hope this helps.

Try this:
tar cf - <FOLDER> | ( cd <new_location> ; tar xf - )
HTH Robert

I'm a total rookie.. but if it's not too many folders, could you use:

Code:

touch -mt YYYYMMDDHHMM

After you used mv, to change the modified date back to whatever Date & Time you'd like?

Hi!. Suppose you want to move content from /srcfolder to /dstfolder...try this:

Code:

# cd /srcfolder
# find . -depth -print | cpio -pdumv /dstfolder

This will keep you files modification dates.

Hope this helps!

A standard way to relocate directories:

Code:

tar cf - ./src  | ( cd /path; tar xfp -);

If you need to rename the destination use a mv command on the dest directory itself:

Code:

mv /path/src /path/dest