Question

I want to list all of the files that are being copied by a cp command but the -v switch doesn't seem to exist on the servers here at work. I'm not sure exactly which OS this is. I think it might be SunOS. How could I find out if that is important?

Thanks

Answer 1

You could use tar piped to tar instead, which may be more featureful, as you can harness the power of tar in addition to being a cross-platform verbosity solution.

tar -cvpf . - | (cd destination/directory && tar -xvpf -)

Answer 2

You could also try ditto (if it's present on your machine). ditto -V will print out each filename as it's copied.

Answer 3

One more option is rsync -v.

Answer 4

cat /etc/issue

to get the distro name

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unison is lovely too if you can get it installed on the server

http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/