UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hello Intelligent Life Forms (I hope)

This should be a snap for some of you.
I need to copy the /usr .profiles from 1 sco system to another.
Migrating to a new server.

I've tried a recursive copy to the target system with a NFS mount point from the source. Wouldn't do it permissions problem.

Tried creating a tar file from the source /usr/file but again got a permissions error on the restore. But only for the file I needed, .profile, all other files restored to the target. Most of the .profile files I see have permissions set to -rw--r--r.

The only way I was able to push one of the .profile files across was logging into the source system and ftp'ing it to the target. Too many usrs on the system to make this practical.
Please send help,
Thanks

Sometimes you can get the NFS filesystem mounted in such a way as to give the NFS client's root account full access. But what I would do is create a tar archive on the client. Use NFS to copy the tar archive to the NFS server. Log on to the NFS server. Now untar the archive as root. At this point your are simply root resoring a tar archive to local disks...no NFS permissions to bite you.

Perderabo,

I thank you for your suggestion. I'm not real NFS savvy. I tried to do what you suggested but there were a few system files that required updating and I was uncomfortable with doing that.
So what I did was ...I logged into the source system as root and created a tar file. (from the /usr directory) tar cvf usr_profiles /usr/*/.profile Then from that system I ftp'd to the target server and placed the file (usr_profiles) in it's /usr directory. Then I just did a tar xvf usr_profiles and all the accounts in the directory were updated properly with the .profiles. I thought I had done this very same thing last week and it didn't work. Apparently not or some "devine intervention" prevailed. The power of prayer. Works for me .Thanks again.