Re: Memory consumption with cp -l

[Ole Tange]

On Mon, 10 Mar 2003, Ole Tange wrote:

> You can reproduce the error by doing the following:
>
> wget http://home.tange.dk/~tange/cp-bug/test-set.tgz
> tar xfz test-set.tgz
> cp-4.1 -Rl test-set t2     # Memusage: 18 MB for cp-4.1
> cp-4.5.9 -Rl test-set t3   # Memusage: 5.9 MB for cp-4.5.9

The story is getting weirder by the minute: I happended to discover, that
cpio has a --link option. It seems it does the same as -l. To see if it
had the same problem I ran:

  find test-set -print0 | cpio -p -0 --link t3 -d

This takes up less that 2 MB RAM continously. Just like 'cp -Rl' it fails
if you try to link across devices. I have yet to see a situation where the
find/cpio does not do the same as cp-Rl. If there is no such situation
then maybe cp-Rl should be implemented using the same techniques as
find/cpio? At least find/cpio solved my issue (and I thereby just freed
298 MB RAM *happy*happy*).


/Ole
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