copying whole diretory and subs

Edit following a large bit of dyslexia :lol:

BTW This is just me trying to find out what the correct command is - I can workaround the problem :)

I am attempting to copy across the whole of /etc/cups from an eeepc to a pen drive to see if this is a simpel way of cloning printer setup from one to another.

The pendrive path is long and to save typing it in I was trying to use

Code:

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cp -r /etc/cups .

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having first navigated to the pendrive folder, but this ends up creating a folder called cups on the pendrive and not a folder called etc with a cups folder within that as I wanted/expected.

Is there syntax to do what I want?

regards

Simon

You want:

Code:

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cp -r /etc/cups/* <dest>

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(copy recursively the contents of /etc/cups to <dest>)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by jinnantonnix

You'll probably have to use 'sudo' before the command; there's protected system stuff in cups.

Edit: maybe not - eepcs are a lot more open than regular linux machine.

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/etc/cups isn't very sensitive so you can normally read from it. If you were using rm, yes you'd have to be root.

Soory about my writing rm instead of cp :doh:

Just for a bit of clarifcation :)

I was trying to copy whole of /etc/cups to pen drive folder so I can transfer to anothe eeePC

pen drive path is very long and full of spaces/capitals e.g

/media/DataTraveler 2.0/KINGSTON and I've created a folder on there called asusk so full path is

/media/DataTraveler 2.0/KINGSTON/asusk

Its very easy to get to this path via file manger when pen drive is pluuged in and then just do a Ctrl-Shift-T to bring up a terminal window and a quick sudo su and I'm nicely in my dest folder.

Then I'd just like to copy the whole of /etc/cups to my current path

cp -r /etc/cups/* .

is the one that does it :)

Ta everyone and sorry for mix up :)

regards

Simon

if you want to copy directory's you must 'force' cp to do so.

Code:

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cp -rf /etc/cups /mnt/PENDRIVE/

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will copy /etc/cups and all it's contents (assuming you have permissions to read the files/folders) to /mnt/PENDRIVE

Quote:

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Originally Posted by SimpleSi

The pendrive path is long and to save typing it in I was trying to use

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Create a shell script with Geoff's command and run that, less typing for you. Geoff may me able to help here not sure but wouldn't the --preserve switch keep all the file permissions?

Code:

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cp --preserve -rf /etc/cups /mnt/PENDRIVE/

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You may also have to create that mount point.

you can just use '-P' rather than '--preserve'. However if things are getting fiddly, you'd be better tarballing the directory up and moving it around wrapped up like that.