On Fri, 14 Aug 2009 04:47:24 +0200
meino.cramer@gmx.de wrote:

>  I am looking for a faster way to do a
> 
>     cp -a r <thisdir> <thatdir>
> 
>  locally on one machine with one harddisk inside.

rsync can parallel some of the tasks, like creating paths while files
are being copied, so I guess it wouldn't hurt to test it against cp:

  rsync -HaAX <thisdir> <thatdir>

Flags are:

 -H - hardlinks
 -a - ids, modes, timestamps
 -A - ACLs
 -X - extended attributes

You might want to throw in '-x' for 'one-file-system', but that
contradicts with behavior of given cp example.

-- 
Mike Kazantsev // fraggod.net