Copying a Directory Tree Recursively Using tar
September 22, 2023 —
Gregg Szumowski
You can use tar to copy a directory tree to another
directory in one shot along with preserving ownership,
permissions and timestamps. This also avoids making an intermediary
tarfile which may cause problems if the size of the file copy
is large and the storage resources are low. Just cd to the
top of the directory that you want to copy and begin.
Let’s assume that you want to copy the contents of the source directory to a target directory:
$ cd /path/to/source
$ tar cf - * | (cd /target; tar xfp - )