Question

I have a directory structure as:/apps/amr. I want to take a backup of amr as it is(i.e without de-referencing links).Now the /apps directory has a different user and group that it belongs to( and i don’t have access to that). I am logged in as a different user and group. So obviously in /apps directory executing:

    mkdir amr_backup
    cp -dR amr amr_backup

doesn’t work as permission denied.
So,I am trying to do the same in /apps/amr directory as amr directory has the same user and group i logged in as. But when executing:

    mkdir amr_backup
    cp -dR * amr_backup

It shows this error:

    cp: cannot copy a directory, `amr_backup`, into itself, `amr_backup/amr_backup'

which is obvious because the amr_backup directory itself is within /apps/amr.
And also I can see not everything is backed up properly:

    du -sh /apps/amr
    8.6G    /apps/amr
    du -sh /apps/amr/amr_backup
    4.3G    /apps/amr/amr_backup

So kindly give me a resolution around.

Answer 1

I say, keep it simple…

mkdir .tmp
cp -dR * .tmp/.
mv .tmp amr_backup

The glob expansion of * will not include anything beginning with . so the hidden directory will not itself be a source directory.