S6-HIERCOPY(1)

📦 version 2.3.1.2, in nixpkgs unstable

💖 S6-HIERCOPY(1) 💖

okay so bestie, this is a page from the General Commands Manual — welcome to s6-hiercopy, and yes we're gonna get into it 🫶

✨ NAME ✨

s6-hiercopy — copy a directory structure recursively. literally what it says on the tin, no cap 🎀

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

s6-hiercopy source destination

two args, that's the whole vibe 💅

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

so s6-hiercopy recursively copies source to destination, and destination gets created if it doesn't exist already, periodt. The permissions are preserved. The owner and group are preserved if the user is the superuser 👑

It exits 0 on success and 111 on temporary failure.

okay now the story time part because this is genuinely iconic 😭 Copying files and browsing through directories is one of Unix's weakest points, and s6-hiercopy is not meant to work around the problem — it's only a quick hack that the author needed to boot an embedded platform. The original plan was to write the ultimate cp utility: portable and reliable and featureful and everything, while needing approximately a hundred times less resources than GNU cp does, of course 🌈 But the idea eventually got dropped: it's impossible to design, much less write, such a utility. Notably, you cannot make it reliable because Unix's set of filesystem management primitives is just too weak — it lacks a lot of atomic operations, and filesystem transactions.

heads up bestie: as a result, s6-hiercopy is a walking race condition and should absolutely not be considered instant when used in a multitasking environment 💀 But then, cp shouldn't either. fr fr.

There is no standard way of creating device nodes on a filesystem, so any cp-like utility is inherently non-portable 🙈 Fortunately, most systems still agree on the non-portable usages of the mknod specification[1], so things should work in practice. Consequently, the s6-hiercopy utility has been moved from s6-linux-utils[2] to s6-portable-utils ✨

💅 EXIT STATUS 💅

  • 111 — Temporary error.
  • 100 — Permanent error, such as a misuse.
  • 127 — Unable to execute program - not found.
  • 126 — Unable to execute program - other reason.

🍓 SEE ALSO 🍓

the whole squad, gathered, main character energy only 👑:

s6-basename(1), s6-cat(1), s6-chmod(1), s6-chown(1), s6-clock(1), s6-cut(1), s6-dirname(1), s6-dumpenv(1), s6-echo(1), s6-env(1), s6-expr(1), s6-false(1), s6-format-filter(1), s6-grep(1), s6-head(1), s6-linkname(1), s6-ln(1), s6-ls(1), s6-maximumtime(1), s6-mkdir(1), s6-mkfifo(1), s6-nice(1), s6-nuke(1), s6-pause(1), s6-printenv(1), s6-quote(1), s6-quote-filter(1), s6-rename(1), s6-rmrf(1), s6-seq(1), s6-sleep(1), s6-sort(1), s6-sync(1), s6-tai64ndiff(1), s6-tail(1), s6-touch(1), s6-true(1), s6-uniquename(1), s6-unquote(1), s6-unquote-filter(1), s6-update-symlinks(1), seekablepipe(1)

and the footnotes, so you can go read the receipts yourself 🔥

This man page is ported from the authoritative documentation at: https://skarnet.org/software/s6-portable-utils/s6-hiercopy.html 💜

🧚 AUTHORS 🧚

  • Laurent Bercot
  • Alexis <flexibeast@gmail.com> (man page port)

and that's the whole page bestie, slay 💖✨ this one came to you from Debian, dated April 18, 2022 — mwah, go copy some directories responsibly 🎀🦋

📦 where this page comes from