Hardlink sub-directories and files

Dan Stromberg drsalists at gmail.com
Wed Aug 3 20:34:04 EDT 2011


On Wed, Aug 3, 2011 at 2:54 PM, Thomas Jollans <t at jollybox.de> wrote:

>
> On 03/08/11 23:25, Dan Stromberg wrote:
> >     > Interesting.  Of course, it's probably readily available to you.
>  What
> >     > *ix are you seeing that doesn't include cpio by default?
> >
> >     Arch Linux - the base install is quite minimal.
>

Hmmmm...

So we're probably not talking about portability to Android...  Because it's
too minimal, too different?

>>     Which implementations of cp don't implement -R and -l?
>>
>>
>> Probably most of them, except GNU and newer BSD.
>
>     Okay. While GNU libc manuals usually document how portable functions
are
>     in detail, that's not true for the GNU coreutils manuals.

You don't really need it in the coreutils doc.

I'd feel very safe assuming that 98+% of all *ix's (not counting Android)
either have cpio installed by default, or can easily get it via their native
package manager.

The same isn't true of a cp with new features.

> I don't think cpio is in GNU coreutils.  Also, I think GNU cpio is a
> reimplementation, not the original.

Indeed. But cp is in the coreutils, and that was what we were talking about.
>

Sorry.  Maybe you should describe what you believe we -are- talking about,
then?  I guess I missed that.

I thought it was portability.


> As for GNU cpio, that's simply what /usr/bin/cpio, if present, is
> expected to be on a GNU/Linux system.
>

Well, yes, but:
1) GNU/Linux is important
2) GNU/Linux isn't the end all and be all

(I wrote:)
> cpio's been around since PWB/Unix, which sits between 6th Edition Unix
> and 7th Edition.  It should be in just about everything, unless a
> vendor/distributor got pretty zealous about cutting duplicate utilities.

I guess this is boiling down to "A pure python solution might be better,
since some folks don't like to use their package managers"

Also, a pure python solution should work on windows - these shell commands
don't unless you have one of the many ports of *ix tools to windows
installed.
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