Tar Wars

Here's a little, galactic-history lesson. When you finish it, you'll know both a new command and a portable way to copy directory hierarchies.

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, there was a great struggle over which archiving tool the POSIX standard would choose: BSD's tar or AT&T's cpio. Who would rule the Empire? TAR2-D2 or 3Cpio? This mouse-and-frog battle was dubbed Tar Wars. (Cue John Williams' score.)

The winner was us. AT&T's Glenn Fowler, with Joerg Schilling, designed and implemented pax (Posix Archive eXchange), to supplant both. Pax would read and write either format, and is now on every POSIX-conforming system. Better still, on mine it's 30% smaller than tar, and less than a third the size of cpio.

Peace through unity.

A little-known-by-me feature of pax is that it will even copy directory hierarchies. Me, I use cp -a to do this job, but that's a GNU-specific idiom. Other versions of cp may lack the -a flag.

This portable command will copy olddir into newdir (newdir must exist), preserving ownerships and permissions:

$ sudo pax -pewr olddir newdir

Mnemonic: the copy is pure ("pewr").