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From: "Lisa Casey" <lisa@jellico.com>
To: <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org>
Date: Fri, 1 Dec 2006 14:20:42 -0500
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Subject: Moving /var/mail
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Hi,

I want to move /var/mail to /usr/var/mail, then symlink /var/mail to 
/usr/var/mail to free up space on my (too small on this machine) /var. Of 
course, I wish to maintain file permissions, ownerships, etc. I decided to 
try a dry run using a user home directory first to make sure this would work 
right. Good thing I did...

I created /usr/kellyw  and attempted to copy the contents of  /home/kellyw/ 
to it. First of all, I tried tar cvpf /usr/kellyw/kellyw.tar /home/kellyw/

When I unpack the tar file, I wind up with /usr/kellyw/home/kellyw/*  Not 
what I wanted. I wanted all of the files in /home/kellyw/ to wind up in 
/usr/kellyw/

So I then tried to just copy the files using cp -p but I can't get the 
syntax right on that:

# cd /home/kellyw
# ls -l
total 16
-rw-r--r--  1 kellyw  kellyw  767 Aug 18 14:52 .cshrc
-rw-r--r--  1 kellyw  kellyw  248 Aug 18 14:52 .login
-rw-r--r--  1 kellyw  kellyw  158 Aug 18 14:52 .login_conf
-rw-------  1 kellyw  kellyw  373 Aug 18 14:52 .mail_aliases
-rw-r--r--  1 kellyw  kellyw  331 Aug 18 14:52 .mailrc
-rw-r--r--  1 kellyw  kellyw  797 Aug 18 14:52 .profile
-rw-------  1 kellyw  kellyw  276 Aug 18 14:52 .rhosts
-rw-r--r--  1 kellyw  kellyw  975 Aug 18 14:52 .shrc
# cp -p /home/kellyw/* /usr/kellyw/*
cp: No match.
# cp -p /home/kellyw/ /usr/kellyw/
cp: /home/kellyw/ is a directory (not copied).
# cp -p /home/kellyw/*.* /usr/kellyw/*.*
cp: No match.

Can someone help me out with my syntax? The tar method would probably be 
better (I guess) though I don't really care  which method I use as long as 
it works (and preserves permissions, etc.). There are only about 60 
mailboxes on this system.

Thanks,

Lisa Casey