[wplug] cp Maildir to new machine

Jonathan S Billings billings at negate.org
Mon Jan 3 13:13:52 EST 2005


John Harrold wrote:
> Sometime in January Scott F. Kiesling assaulted the keyboard and produced:

> | would like to get my mail off my old machine, which will not
> | connect to the net (hence new laptop). I can copy to a USB
> | drive and then copy from that to my new machine.

...


> Have you tried rsync?
> 
> rsync -av -e "ssh -2" /var/mail/whatever/ root at mail:/var/mail/whatever
> 
> Just a thought.

That won't work without a network connection.

Scott F. Kiesling wrote:
 > Here's the error:
 >
 > cp: cannot create regular file '/path/file:2,RS': Invalid
 > argument

The problem is most likely due to the fact that you are using a FAT 
partition on the USB device.  I think it won't allow files with a ':' in it.

I suggest using tar to write a 'tar' archive, copy that to the USB 
device, then un-tar the archive on the new system.  So, you'd run 
something like this:

tar cpvf /mnt/usbdrive/Maildir.tar ~/Maildir;

unmount the USB drive, mount it on the new system, and then run

tar xpvf /mnt/usbdrive/Maildir.tar




-- 
Jonathan S. Billings <billings at negate.org>


More information about the wplug mailing list