Re: Memory consumption with cp -l

[Jim Meyering]

Ole Tange <address@hidden> wrote:
> I am using 'cp -l' to copy a large file structure. I was a bit surprised
> that 'cp -l' used 300 MB RAM where as 'cp -a' used around 1 MB.

Thank you for the report.
Unfortunately, I can't reproduce that using the latest version from here:

  ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-4.5.9.tar.bz2
  (coreutils is the union of fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils)

I tried cp/linking a 5.0 GB hierarchy containing just under 1 million files,
but memory usage (virtual/resident were the same) did not exceed 750KB.
I used these commands:

  mkdir .junk
  cp -Rl * .junk

But it was a pretty shallow tree with short names.
The longest path name was just 54 bytes.

If you can reproduce the problem using the latest version
mentioned above, would you please send more information?