From (insert name here)'s post, it looks like Perl's copy function is opening one file, reading some bytes and then spitting them out to another file...for lots of small files, this is probably the most efficent way to go about it.

But, I'd be willing to be that for very large files, it's probably faster to use 'system("cp file1 file2")'.

What you're trading here is the time it takes to do the system call vs.the speed of a native executable that might be pulling tricks at the file system level.

P.S. You're not running RedHat 2.1..it doesn't even have support for files > 2gb. :)