site_archiver@lists.apple.com Delivered-To: darwin-kernel@lists.apple.com Godfrey On 10/08/2006, at 09:16 , Jeffrey Ellis wrote: _______________________________________________ Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored. Darwin-kernel mailing list (Darwin-kernel@lists.apple.com) Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/darwin-kernel/site_archiver%40lists.a... ditto is about very efficient reproduction of a directory tree from one place onto another possibly partially populated tree. The key word is efficient, i.e. fast. It is very highly optimised and is used in the Apple build procedure, you may have noticed that the open source is in several projects. Apple builds an image by, building each of the some 1500 projects, into a directory tree known as a project root. Then they 'ditto' the project root onto a image root, adding layer after layer of projects until the final image is made. Finally ditto was written when the only reliable way of copying file meta-data was to use tar c dir | (cd target; tar x), which is what it is designed to emulate. Okay, so I guess this is my next question. If cp does everything, why would anyone use ditto? I always thought that was used because of it's ability to copy resource forks. This email sent to site_archiver@lists.apple.com