For some reason, 'tar|tar' is many times faster than 'cp -a' (at least, when you're copying thousands of small files in deeply nested directories, on OS X). I n

For some reason, 'tar|tar' is many times faster than 'cp -a' (at least, when you're copying thousands of small files in deeply nested directories, on OS X). I noticed this once through experimenation, tried to find out why, and never got a good answer. The other thing is that hard-linked files are apparently handled differently: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/316078/interesting-usage-of-tar-but-what-is-happening http://stackoverflow.com/questions/316078/interesting-usage-...