3 ms·

I'm glad I asked, I wasn't realizing that `cat` would read from stdin in this case. Makes sense, given the Unix piping philosophy (which I use to great effect

by jnbiche 11y ago

I'm glad I asked, I wasn't realizing that `cat` would read from stdin in this case. Makes sense, given the Unix piping philosophy (which I use to great effect on buffers in vim). But wrt your trick to copy a tree of files, what's wrong with `cp -r src dest`, or `scp -r src desthostname:/dest` if it's over a network? Is there some advantage this way?

pjungwir 11y ago
It's not quite the same as `cp -r`. Tar will create the directories if necessary, but it will also drop the files into an existing folder hierarchy. So you could use it to create/update a few entries in an existing tree of files. For instance you could deploy updates to a website like this (locally): cd ~/src/mysite && tar cf - . | (cd /var/www/public_html && tar xvf -) or this (remotely): cd ~/src/mysite && tar czf - . | ssh mysite 'tar xvzf - -C /var/www/public_html' I would probably actually use rsync for this, but there have been times the tar approach came in handy. A long time ago, in the dark ages of version control, I used to use tar for rollback-able deployments: I would create a tarball of the files in development to be deployed, and I would create a tarball of the files in production to be overwritten. Then I could just explode one tarball to deploy and the other to rollback. Not something I'd do today, but we didn't always have such nice tools. :-)