> I browsed the net for other peoples' experience with copying many files and quickly decided that cp would do the job nicely.
After 20 years you no longer google how to copy files.
Edit: Reading on he talks about strace and even reading cp's source code which makes it even weirder that he had to google how to do this...
Edit2: Comments! Took only ten downvotes before someone bothered to explain what I was doing wrong, but now there are three almost simultaneously. I guess those make a few good points. I'd still think cp ought to handle just about anything especially given its ubiquitousness and age, but I see the point.
And to clarify: I'm not saying the author is stupid or anything. It's just weird to me that someone with that much experience would google something which on the surface sounds so trivial, even at 40TB.
Because the man is wise. He also didn't kill a job that appeared to be hung, he started reading the code to figure out why and determined that it would in fact, complete.
Because it turns out cp _barely_ managed to do the job, and he was almost wrong despite googling. (It did the job, I don't know about 'nicely')
Just assuming that, oh, cp copies files, of course it can copy a few terrabytes no problem... is something that you might do, but not something someone with 20 years experience with unix would do.
I'm not yet 20 years into this game, but the further I go, the more I'm finding I need to be willing to swallow my pride and check in with the current state of best practices.
Whenever you get to extreme cases, there's always going to be something subtle. I'm sure he didn't google " how to copy files", but looked for people who'd worked with many terabytes of data. Reminds me of a nice story by Reginakd Braithwaite: http://raganwald.com/2013/03/26/the-interview.html
Because the typical use case of copying a few files does not really compare to the use case of having to copy 43 terabyte of critical data that may or may not have corruptions. It's nothing but wise to double check.
> I browsed the net for other peoples' experience with copying many files and quickly decided that cp would do the job nicely.
After 20 years you no longer google how to copy files.
Edit: Reading on he talks about strace and even reading cp's source code which makes it even weirder that he had to google how to do this...
Edit2: Comments! Took only ten downvotes before someone bothered to explain what I was doing wrong, but now there are three almost simultaneously. I guess those make a few good points. I'd still think cp ought to handle just about anything especially given its ubiquitousness and age, but I see the point.
And to clarify: I'm not saying the author is stupid or anything. It's just weird to me that someone with that much experience would google something which on the surface sounds so trivial, even at 40TB.