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Date: Sat, 12 May 2007 15:40:04 -0600
From: Eric Blake <ebb9 AT byu DOT net>
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To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Subject: Re: Speed of Cygwin's cp vs. Windows Explorer
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According to Bob Heckel on 5/12/2007 7:23 AM:
> Why would using Cygwin's cp to copy a large file from one Windows XP
> box to another take 30 minutes but take only 10 minutes if I use drag
> 'n' drop (via Explorer)?

It has been mentioned in the past, and one of the ideas was adding support
for posix_fadvise (added in the snapshots, but not in 1.5.x) and making
coreutils take advantage of it to give Windows better hints about how the
data being manipulated will be laid out.  I have not yet had time to play
with this idea further, and the upstream coreutils maintainers are
reluctant to rely on posix_fadvise just yet (since Linux currently has a
bug where stating a file is read-once flushes it from the os cache for ALL
processes, rather than just the process that is only going to read it
once, which makes the read-once hint rather useless).

> I'm in a position of defending the use of Cygwin instead of the manual
> Windows way of doing things by those not familiar with Unix.  Any
> hints would be appreciated.

At least cygwin cp preserves permissions correctly.  Windows drag-n-drop
has the annoying tendency of marking everything executable.

- --
Don't work too hard, make some time for fun as well!

Eric Blake             ebb9 AT byu DOT net
volunteer cygwin coreutils maintainer
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