Who would have thought that something as simple as copying a number of files would have created so much discussion? Thanks for that - I now understand a bit more of why it failed. One thing that will definitely be changed is to put it in various subdirectories to make it easier to copy in the future. The good news is that we managed to get the files copied using mc on a 64 bit machine - took 36 hours though. It was definitely faster on a 64 bit machine (Dual Xeon 3.4GHz, 2GB RAM) than on a 32 bit machine (P4 2.4GHz, 512MB RAM). I should have the disk back with me within the next week or so. Currently it is in the UK where they needed the images (graphic files) for a presentation. Unfortunately they have already prepared the drive for shipping before I could stop them to test some of your suggestions. I will try and see if I can get them to put it back into the machine. We can access a file if we know what the file name is. It is therefore possible to manipulate (rm/cp/ls) any single file and possibly a number of files. Each image is 125x125 pixels named according to a numeric value indicating a number on a grid which in turn represents the world. These images contain some demographic information compiled from various sources within our company. During development we ran into a problem where the graphics was created incorrectly. We then tried to delete the files but couldn’t. At the end we've found that mc can delete them - given enough time. I could possibly use the following to copy the files in to a more manageable directory structure: On Wednesday 31 August 2005 at about 17:46, Jerry Feldman wrote:
Assume that the source directory is mounted as /usr/localfoo and the target directory is mounted on /mnt: cd /usr/local/foo find . -type f -exec cp -p {} /mnt \; This is assuming that /usr/local/foo does not have subdirectories. You can set appropriate flags in find to prevent recursion. Another possibility is to partition the output into a number of subdirectories: Assume that you may have directories: /mnt/a, /mnt/b, ... find . -name \[aA\]* -exec cp -p {} /mnt/a \;
I will also try ls -U (to get an unsorted directory listing as suggested by Jim Cunning). Thanks again for all the suggestions. The response was fantastic. Albert -- No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Anti-Virus. Version: 7.0.344 / Virus Database: 267.10.18/86 - Release Date: 31/08/2005