On Wed, Dec 29, 2021 at 8:18 AM Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:

Where and when did mvdir(1) appear?  It's not in Research or BSD.   

FWIW: in the old days, I just used  tar cf - . | (cd some_place_else; tar xvpf - )  preserving permissions.  The hardlink scheme of cpio was the one thing it could do that the original tar did not.

I'm partial to:

(cd /source/dir && tar cf - .) | (cd /dest/dir && tar xfp -)

The &&'s make it so a typo is less likely to do something odd or even damaging.