Question

I’m currently using the usual technique in my Makefile to install individual files:

install:     install -D executable ${BIN_DIR} 

But I just ran across a situation where I need to move a whole directory and all files underneath it into place.

Is cp -r the best way or is there a more linux-y/unix-y way to do this?

Answer 1

Yeah, it’s hard to think of a more unix-ish way that cp -r, although the -r is a relatively late addition to cp. I can tell you the way we used to do it, and that works neatly across filesystems and such:

Let src be the source directory you want to move, and /path/to/target be an absolute path to the target. Then you can use:

$ tar cf - src | (cd /path/to/target; tar xf -)