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Comments on What's the fastest way to copy, preserving file attributes, on each platform?

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What's the fastest way to copy, preserving file attributes, on each platform?

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I am looking copy files platform-dependently on Linux, Oracle Solaris, MacOS, BSDs, and Windows.

I have found some system calls for each platform, namely sendfile(), copy_file_range(), fcopyfile(), CopyFile() et cetera. But some of them are documented to copy file attributes, whilst some are not. I am uncertain whether it would be better to do a stat() + chmod() prior the syscalls that do not copy attributes, or go with the classic route of open() + stat() + chmod() + read() + write(), that's guaranteed to work across all UNIX-like systems, and perhaps even Windows.

What is each platform's fastest solution to copy a file with attributes?

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4 comment threads

Highlight the question (4 comments)
Why platform dependent? (2 comments)
Too broad (1 comment)
Any particular use-case? (3 comments)
Any particular use-case?
Lundin‭ wrote 5 months ago

Is there any particular use-case scenario you have in mind? Because no matter system, one way to work around file I/O bottlenecks is just to outsource it all to a separate thread. Then let that thread chew away at the files at whatever pace it likes and be done with it. In which case performance of the actual file I/O is much less important.

Melkor-1‭ wrote 5 months ago · edited 5 months ago

Lundin‭ Making backup/temp files during saving files in a text editor is the current use-case.

Lundin‭ wrote 5 months ago

Unless the amount of data is huge, simply copy it down to a separate buffer and let another thread take it from there? Then only the RAM copy time will lag down the GUI and not the file I/O. At which point the optimization should focus on slimming down the copy time.