From: utzoo!decvax!harpo!npoiv!npois!cbosgd!mark
Newsgroups: net.followup
Title: Re: More directory junk
Article-I.D.: cbosgd.2922
Posted: Wed Dec 29 12:16:21 1982
Received: Thu Dec 30 04:27:24 1982
Reply-To: mark@cbosgd.UUCP (Mark Horton)
References: alice.1351

A few notes are in order.

Many systems do not have cpio, since it's a USG program.  4.1BSD
and V7 do not have it, but have tar instead.  Back to back tars
can be used to copy heirarchies in place of a find|cpio.  tar is
also present on USG systems.

Methods that compact directories such as /usr/spool/uucp by moving
the directory out of place, copying the heirarchy into a fresh
directory, and removing the old copy will fail if the filesystem is
nearly full and the spool directory is large.

A simple method I often use by hand (I don't have a debugged shell
script) looks something like this:
	cd /usr/spool
	mv uucp ouucp
	mkdir uucp
	mv ouucp/* uucp
	rmdir ouucp
This is not recursive, but is simple, fast, and doesn't require much
scratch space.  If you have a USG system and the directory contains
subdirectories, it won't work since mv won't move directories.