Question

We’re migrating home folders to a new filesystem, and I am looking for a way to automate it using Perl or a shell script. I don’t have much choice in programming languages as the systems are proprietary storage clusters that should remain as unchanged as possible.

Task: Under directory /home/ I have various users’ home folders aaa, bbb, ccc, … and they have certain permissions and user/group ownership that need to remain intact upon migration to /newhome/. Here’s example of what needs to be migrated from /home:

drwxr-xr-x    3 aaaaa    xxxxxxxxx   4096 Feb 26  2008 aaaaa/ drwxrwxrwx   88 bbbbbbb  yyyyyy      8192 Dec 16 16:32 bbbbbbb/ drwxr-xr-x    6 ccccc    yyyyyy      4096 Nov 24 04:38 ccccc/ drwxr-xrwx   36 dddddd   yyyyyy      4096 Jun 20  2008 dddddd/ drwxr-xr-x   27 eee      yyyyyy      4096 Dec 16 02:56 eee/ 

So, exact same folders with permissions and ownerships should be created under /newhome. Copying/moving files should not be a concern, as it will be handled later.

Anyone has worked on such script? I am really new to Perl, so I need help.

Answer 1

cp‘s -a flag will maintain permission, modification times etc. You should for be able to do something like:

for a in `ls /home`; do cp -a '/home/$a' '/newhome/$a' ; done 

Try it with one directory to see if does what you need before automating it.

EDIT: You can disable recursive file copying by using rsync or tar as mentioned by Paul. With rsync, subdirectories are still preserved, but files aren’t copied:

sudo rsync -pgodt /home/ /newhome/ 

I haven’t tried tar’s –no-recursion, so can’t comment on it.

EDIT 2: Another way

find /home/ -maxdepth 1 -print | sudo cpio -pamVd /newhome 

Reference