Fast Unix Commands: https://alexsaveau.dev/blog/pr...

„Tar
Shockingly, collecting a directory into a tarball and then extracting it into a new directory to copy it is often faster than cp.“

Class assignment: explain why🤓

Like 26 Mar 2023 at 7:19 | Open on chaos.social

5 comments

@icing my preferred way of copying a directory for ages has been

(cd source; tar cf - .) | (cd dest; tar xf -)

I can never remember how cp -r works.

26 Mar 2023 at 7:31 | Open on chaos.social

@icing cp is slow in general in most cases. with tar, file accesses are buffered, inodes are preloaded, etc. somewhat related: https://ariadne.space/2022/07/17/how-efficient-can-cat1-be/

26 Mar 2023 at 7:37 | Open on social.treehouse.systems

@ariadne Nice article! Never used splice before - it shows my age.😌

26 Mar 2023 at 7:55 | Open on chaos.social

@ariadne The other advantage of tar: it uses 2 cores without interference into each other memory caches.

26 Mar 2023 at 8:11 | Open on chaos.social

@icing I'm afraid I always use rsync. Which probably tells you I only copy small directories (or always have another task I can be doing…)

26 Mar 2023 at 9:43 | Open on ruby.social