Losing data with routine cp and mv -- "cannot create hard link"

Bjoern Kahl AG Resy kahl@informatik.uni-kl.de
Thu Jan 16 13:27:00 GMT 2003


 Hallo!

 I do not know what is going on really, but I have seen something
 like that before.

On Thu, 16 Jan 2003, Thomas Baker wrote:

>    If cp and mv are not reliably copying all of the contents
>    of an (apparently) normal directory tree with 89,000 normal
>    data files, of 1.4 GB total size, using WIN2000 and NTFS,
>    is it most likely due to inherent size limits of cygwin?

  <wild guessing mode>

 There seems to be a random delay in the NT-Filesystem when renaming
 files. This can be easily triggert on smb-shares, but also on
 "normal" drives.

 If renaming (that is: moving around) files, there is a short,
 load-dependend delay between removing the old direktory entry and
 creating the new one. This can even be observed in the windows
 explorer, and I *think* that is not a slow-gui-issue, but the file
 is *really* *not* *there* form some time.

 </wild guessing mode>

 So dont think there is any thing cygwin can do.

> If the problems are due to inherent limits, then I can
> adjust by copying such big directories in smaller chunks,
> as I have already done successfully.  I just want to make
> sure that this is in fact the problem.

 If I move/copy some files over the net, I add sleep instructions
 ("for i in * ; do mv $i $i.bak ; sleep 1 ; sed <$i.bak >$i ... ; done")
 slow, but works. On *my* system, the magic number is around 50 files.
 Less than 50 files works without sleep, more files require the
 sleep. (Else I get a lot random "No such file xxx.bak".)


   Bjoern

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