How hard can it be to copy a directory on z/OS

My home directory had filled up, and I wanted to copy my files to a file system with more space. This took me much longer than I expected.

Philippe Richard said you should take a look at copytree (in /samples). Nice tool to clone/copy directories. can be run as a unix script or under TSO REXX.

copy using cp

I used cp -R olddir newdir but not all of the files were copied.

tar complained

I used tar -cf old /u/colin/* but got

FSUM7218 tar: /u/colin/env/lib/python3.12/….pyc: name too long

I got pax wrong (1)

I used

pax -w – -f /u/tmp/zowet/archive /u/colin/*

The gave message

FSUMF319 File tag exists but pax cannot store the tag information using this format/option(s) for file /u/colin/env/lib…json.py

I needed the -x os390 option

I got pax wrong (2)

pax -w -x os390 -f /u/tmp/zowet/archive /u/colin/*

The backup worked fine. Unfortunately when I restored from the archive it overwrote the same directory – because I had explicitly coded the fully qualified name /u/colin.

I got pax wrong (3)

cd /u/colin
pax -w -x os390 -f /u/tmp/zowet/archive .

The files are relative to the directory (.) when the files are restored they are also relative to the directory

cd /u/tmp/zowet/colin
pax -ppx -rvf /u/tmp/zowet/archive

This command unpaxes the files from /u/tmp/zowet/archive into the current directory, and prints out the names (-v) as it does so.

The names were displayed, like

./bsdel.sh

so you can see the file name is a relative, rather than fully qualified.

It looked like it worked – but the files belonged to the userid that created them from the pax file.

I got pax right

pax -ppox -rvf ../archive

The -p option specifies which file characteristics to restore

• o Preserves the user ID and group ID.
• p Preserves the file mode: access permissions (without modification by umask), set-user-ID bit, set-group-ID bit, and sticky bit.
• x Preserves extended attributes

I’m sure there are other methods to do the copy.