[Tfug] PORTABLE hierarchy copy

[Bexley Hall]

Hi,

I often find myself copying large portions of a hierarchy
from one place to another.  Source and destination paths
may be local or remote mounts, different file system types,
different OS's, Endianness, etc.

Historically, I've opted for something along the lines of:
    cd <destination>
    (cd <source>; tar cpf - * ) | tar xpf -
as it seems to work regardless of tar(1) flavor, <source>,
<destination>, etc.

Is there a more "efficient" -- as defined in terms of keystrokes,
CPU cycles, network activity (for remote file systems), etc. -- way
of doing this that *doesn't* require building an executable for
each system?  (I run several flavors of Solaris Intel/SPARC, NetBSD,
and a variety of oddball OS's that you've probably not heard of so
a solution that only works for "certain" OS's is probably not gonna
happen)

Thx,
--don

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