linux - How to duplicate a folder exactly

Question

I am trying to copy a filesystem for a device I am programming for. After so much time trying to figure out why the filesystem I was installing wasn't working I found out that cp didn't get the job done. I used du -s to check the size of the original filesystem and the one that I copied with cp -r, as it turns out they differ by about 150 bytes.

Something is telling me that symbolic links or some sort of kernel objects aren't being copied correctly.

Is it possible to copy a folder/file system exactly? If so how would I go about it?

question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/19434921/how-to-duplicate-a-folder-exactly

Answer 1

Another popular option is to use tar c source | (cd target && tar x ). See this linuxdevcenter.com article.