Solved cp command - "invalid argument" result

[drummondislebsd]

I have selected a group of files I wish to copy to a USB stick.

I mounted USB stick via ls /dev/da* and that resulted with da0 and da0s1.

mount_msdosfs /dev/da0s1 /media/usb resulted in successful mount.

Tested via cd /media/usb and ls result is system volume.

mkdir /media/usb/my_dir and ls result is /media/usb/my_dir shown

Verification of successful mount--then, as ROOT, I navigated to my the location of the files I wish to copy to USB drive.

cd /home/user_name/my_dir (four sub directories, each containing multiple files)
cp -R /home/user_name/my_dir /media/usb/my_dir

I visually see server display:

cp (file name) :invalid argument

I then navigated back to the file location and ls -l |more showed the ownership was user_name:wheel for each file

Thinking user:group ownership it may be an issue...

chown -R root:wheel /home/user_name/my_dir then ls -l |more verifies all files now owned by root:wheel

Execute command again... same "invalid argument" response

Any ideas?

 

[drummondislebsd]

PS: freebsd FreeBSD release 8.0

First used:
find . -type f -mtime +1 -mtime -30 -exec cp {} /home/user_name/my_dir1/my_dir2/ /home/user_name/my_dir/my_files \;

I ran this four times, changing the path to four locations (my_dir2), and it successfully found files modified in last 30 days and populated each of the four my_files sub directories under /home/user_name/my_dir/my_files(1,2,3,4).

 

[wblock@]

The MS-DOS filesystem does not support many features that are present in current filesystems. That could include special characters in filenames, permissions, or file flags. Examine the files being copied.

 

[drummondislebsd]

The answer is...
#cd /home/user_name/my_dir
#tar cvvpzf my_file.tar.gz /media/usb/my_folder

Changing the file type to a .tar.gz overcame the "write" incompatibility.

FYI... I did fdisk the USB and changed file structure to freebsd (sysid 162) and then chowned, chmoded, but still obtained "invalid argument"...

 

[worldi]

The problem was probably caused by a file whose name started with a dash.

One solution is to use cp --. The "--" means "no more options" so everything after it will be treated as a filename. This also works for other tools (like rm, mkdir, touch, etc.):

$ ls
-strangename
$ cp *strange* /tmp
cp: illegal option -- s
usage: cp [-R [-H | -L | -P]] [-f | -i | -n] [-alpvx] source_file target_file
  cp [-R [-H | -L | -P]] [-f | -i | -n] [-alpvx] source_file ... target_directory
$ cp -- *strange* /tmp
$ rm -- *strange*
$ ls
$