copying whole diretory and subs

[SimpleSi]

Edit following a large bit of dyslexia

 

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

cp -r /etc/cups .

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

Edited May 1, 2009 by SimpleSi

[powdarrmonkey]

You want:

 

cp -r /etc/cups/* 

 

(copy recursively the contents of /etc/cups to )

[powdarrmonkey]

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.

 

/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.

[SimpleSi]

Soory about my writing rm instead of cp

 

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

[Geoff]

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

 

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

 

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

[petectid]

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

 

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?

 

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

 

You may also have to create that mount point.

[Geoff]

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.