I have a large amout of data (several GB) on a remote drive, that is transparently mounted via nfs. I'd like to copy these files into a subdirectory of where they are already residing, so everything stays on the same physical disk. For that reason, I would like to prevent an unnecessary round trip over the network.
It seems that cp files* subdir
does the naive thing and reads all the data into memory and then writes it back. Is that true? Is there a special command that does the actual copying entirely on the server the disk is physically connected to?
cp
), or move (as inmv
)? If you move the files, I don't see why there should be any round-tripping.