Not sure if tar could process all the files in one go - probably, as I've seen it mentioned as a way to feed netcat (nc) for cloning. I'm just up, so the brain capacity is not yet up to speed, so I can't recall the exact syntax - but it involves a tar'ing of the data, piping it to another tar process that unpacks in the source directory...

Might be possible to do it with a bash script that loops over files and copies one at a time - but then again it might complain about the length of the list it has to loop over...

But what's so horrible in splitting the cp command into two? Put them on a single line separated by a ';' and the second will execute immediately after the first one is done, if you want unsupervised/one step copying of all the fids.

/Michael