What do these commands (`tar`) actually do? Is there a better way?

Question

I am going over some documentation from a former colleague of mine. This documentation pertains to creating a distro repo. However, I cannot understand exactly what this commands performs:

[beamin@repo ks]# cd /mnt/
[beamin@repo mnt]# ls
centos-1  centos-2  centos-3
[beamin@repo mnt]# for i in 1 2 3 
> do
> cd /mnt/centos-$i
> tar cpf - . | ( cd /var/ftp/ks/centos/; tar xpf - )
> done

My (obviously incorrect) rundown of it is: Loop through every mounted CD (/mnt/centos-<index>) and create a tar of the folder preserving the permissions. Then, extract that tar file to another folder, again, preserving permissions.

If that is the case, why do it like this? Is there really not a better way? Or perhaps I'm missing the whole idea.

Answer 1

The reason why tar (or cpio) is recommended over cp for this procedure is because of how the tools operate.

cp operates on each file object in turn, reading it from disk and then writing it in its new location. Since the locations of the source and destination may not be close on the disk, this results in a lot of seeking between the locations.

tar and cpio read as much as possible in one go, and then write it into the archive. This means that the source files will be read one after another and the destination files will be written one after another (allowing for process switching, of course), resulting in much less seeking and hence less time taken.

Answer 2

The command performs an exact archive-like copy of a directory sub-tree (i.e. where tar preservers permissions, owner-ship, links etc.).

First, it the command

tar cpf - . | ( cd /var/ftp/ks/centos/; tar xpf - )

is equivalent to

tar cpf - . | tar -C /var/ftp/ks/centos -x -p -f -

where -C specifies the working directory tar should change to before starting to extract the files.

Probably, the colleague just was not aware of the -C option.

Also kind of equivalent is:

cp -a * /var/ftp/ks/centos/

(where -a or --archive stands for -r --preserve=all --no-dereference --preserve=links, i.e. cp preserves then permissions, copies recursively etc. like one expects when doing an exact archive-like copy)

It is not equivalent because the shell pattern matching * does not catch the dot-files in the current working directory. With a different source pattern the reason to choose tar over cp -a is that cp -a is a GNU extension and not POSIX, i.e. a tar solution would be a more portable one.

There are no performance reasons for choosing tar over cp.