Moving Large directories in Solaris

When moving or copying really really large directories on Solaris, you can sometimes run into trouble, especially when some of the files in those directories are larger than 8 Gigabytes.

One solution is to use a “ufsdump pipe to ufsrestore” command, but this might even had problems from time to time.

experimented and checked out from some forums, think the safer method is to use a “tar pipe to tar” command. Be aware, however, that on Solaris you will need to include the “E” flag if the directory you are copying contains files larger than 8 Gigabytes.

Here is an example. Simply “CD” into the directory you want to copy and execute the following command, replacing “/new/directory” with path to the new destination directory.

tar cpBEf - * | (cd /new/directory; tar xBEf -)