CentOS - Jun 2007 - Need to do some careful moving...

When I built this new Centos 5 drive, I copied over much of my old data 
using cp, and did not use the -preserve option.  Ouch.  I need those 
file create dates so that documents and such sort properly, historically.

I recovered much of my stuff from a tar built back in mid-May (but I 
missed that the tar backup ended abnormally, as I was tar-ing to a USB 
attached drive formatted FAT32, and at 4Gb, it stopped).

Now I want to copy all of my newer files into this recovered directory.  
The -u option of cp and mv will do the wrong thing, of course.  I want 
to only copy files that are NOT present in the recovered directory.  I 
will of course still be stuck with a lot of files with a Jun 18 date 
that were created between the backup date and Jun 18, but at least I 
will be better off....

Perhaps I do a mv -f from the recovered to the misdated directory?  
Being careful to protect those few files that HAVE really been modified 
since the backup?


Oh, I am talking about 30k files here.....

On Jun 26, 2007, at 21:03, Robert Moskowitz wrote:
> When I built this new Centos 5 drive, I copied over much of my old  
> data using cp, and did not use the -preserve option.  Ouch.  I need  
> those file create dates so that documents and such sort properly,  
> historically.
>
> I recovered much of my stuff from a tar built back in mid-May (but  
> I missed that the tar backup ended abnormally, as I was tar-ing to  
> a USB attached drive formatted FAT32, and at 4Gb, it stopped).
>
> Now I want to copy all of my newer files into this recovered  
> directory.  The -u option of cp and mv will do the wrong thing, of  
> course.  I want to only copy files that are NOT present in the  
> recovered directory.  I will of course still be stuck with a lot of  
> files with a Jun 18 date that were created between the backup date  
> and Jun 18, but at least I will be better off....
Sounds like the perfect job for rsync.  You probably want to use the - 
a option.  Check out the man page and test on a different directory  
until you get the directory hierarchy just right.

Alfred