xcp is a (partial) clone of the Unix cp command.
It is not intended as a full replacement, but as a companion utility with some more user-friendly feedback and some optimisations that make sense under certain tasks.
This is free and open source software.
Features include:
- Displays a progress-bar, both for directory and single file copies. This can be disabled with –no-progress.
- On Linux it uses copy_file_range call to copy files. This is the most efficient method of file-copying under Linux; in particular it is filesystem-aware, and can massively speed-up copies on network mounts by performing the copy operations server-side. However, unlike copy_file_range sparse files are detected and handled appropriately.
- Optimised for ‘modern’ systems (i.e. multiple cores, copious RAM, and solid-state disks, especially ones connected into the main system bus, e.g. NVMe).
- Optional aggressive parallelism for systems with parallel IO. Quick experiments on a modern laptop suggest there may be benefits to parallel copies on NVMe disks. This is obviously highly system-dependent.
- Switchable ‘drivers’ to facilitate experimenting with alternative strategies for copy optimisation. Currently 2 drivers are available:
- ‘parfile’: the previous hard-coded xcp copy method, which parallelises tree-walking and per-file copying. This is the default.
- ‘parblock’: An experimental driver that parallelises copying at the block level. This has the potential for performance improvements in some architectures, but increases complexity.
- Non-Linux Unix-like OSs (OS X, *BSD) are supported via fall-back operation (although sparse-files are not yet supported in this case).
- Optionally understands .gitignore files to limit the copied directories.
- Optional native file-globbing.
Website: github.com/tarka/xcp
Support:
Developer: Steve Smith
License: GNU General Public License v3.0
xcp is written in Rust. Learn Rust with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
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