How to copy a file to multiple directories using t

问题:

Is it possible to copy a single file to multiple directories using the cp command ?

I tried the following , which did not work:

cp file1 /foo/ /bar/
cp file1 {/foo/,/bar}

I know it's possible using a for loop, or find. But is it possible using the gnu cp command?

回答1:

No, cp can copy multiple sources but will only copy to a single destination. You need to arrange to invoke cp multiple times - once per destination - for what you want to do; using, as you say, a loop or some other tool.

回答2:

You can't do this with cp alone but you can combine cp with xargs:

echo dir1 dir2 dir3 | xargs -n 1 cp file1

Will copy file1 to dir1, dir2, and dir3. xargs will call cp 3 times to do this, see the man page for xargs for details.

回答3:

Wildcards also work with Roberts code

echo ./fs*/* | xargs -n 1 cp test 

回答4:

As far as I can see it you can use the following:

ls | xargs -n 1 cp -i file.dat

The -i option of cp command means that you will be asked whether to overwrite a file in the current directory with the file.dat. Though it is not a completely automatic solution it worked out for me.

回答5:

I would use cat and tee based on the answers I saw at https://superuser.com/questions/32630/parallel-file-copy-from-single-source-to-multiple-targets instead of cp.

For example:

cat <inputfile> | tee <outfile1> <outfile2> > /dev/null

回答6:

ls -db di*/subdir | xargs -n 1 cp File

-b in case there is a space in directory name otherwise it will be broken as a different item by xargs, had this problem with the echo version

回答7:

These answers all seem more complicated than the obvious:

for i in /foo /bar; do cp "$file1" "$i"; done

回答8:

Not using cp per se, but...

This came up for me in the context of copying lots of Gopro footage off of a (slow) SD card to three (slow) USB drives. I wanted to read the data only once, because it took forever. And I wanted it recursive.

$ tar cf - src | tee >( cd dest1 ; tar xf - ) >( cd dest2 ; tar xf - ) | ( cd dest3 ; tar xf - )

(And you can add more of those >() sections if you want more outputs.)

I haven't benchmarked that, but it's definitely a lot faster than cp-in-a-loop (or a bunch of parallel cp invocations).

回答9:

To use copying with xargs to directories using wildcards on Mac OS, the only solution that worked for me with spaces in the directory name is:

find ./fs*/* -type d -print0 | xargs -0 -n 1 cp test 

Where test is the file to copy
And ./fs*/* the directories to copy to

The problem is that xargs sees spaces as a new argument, the solutions to change the delimiter character using -d or -E is unfortunately not properly working on Mac OS.

回答10:

If you want to do it without a forked command:

tee <inputfile file2 file3 file4 ... >/dev/null

回答11:

Essentially equivalent to the xargs answer, but in case you want parallel execution:

parallel -q cp file1 ::: /foo/ /bar/

So, for example, to copy file1 into all subdirectories of current folder (including recursion):

parallel -q cp file1 ::: `find -mindepth 1 -type d`

N.B.: This probably only conveys any noticeable speed gains for very specific use cases, e.g. if each target directory is a distinct disk.

It is also functionally similar to the '-P' argument for xargs.

回答12:

No - you cannot.

I've found on multiple occasions that I could use this functionality so I've made my own tool to do this for me.

http://github.com/ddavison/branch

pretty simple -
branch myfile dir1 dir2 dir3

回答13:

ls -d */ | xargs -iA cp file.txt A

回答14:

Suppose you want to copy fileName.txt to all sub-directories within present working directory.

1. Get all sub-directories names through ls and save them to some temporary file say, allFolders.txt

   ls > allFolders.txt
   

2. Print the list and pass it to command xargs.

   cat allFolders.txt | xargs -n 1 cp fileName.txt
   

回答15:

Another way is to use cat and tee as follows:

cat <source file> | tee <destination file 1> | tee <destination file 2> [...] > <last destination file>

I think this would be pretty inefficient though, since the job would be split among several processes (one per destination) and the hard drive would be writing several files at once over different parts of the platter. However if you wanted to write a file out to several different drives, this method would probably be pretty efficient (as all copies could happen concurrently).

回答16:

Using a bash script

DESTINATIONPATH[0]="xxx/yyy"
DESTINATIONPATH[1]="aaa/bbb"
                ..
DESTINATIONPATH[5]="MainLine/USER"
NumberOfDestinations=6

for (( i=0; i<NumberOfDestinations; i++))
    do
        cp  SourcePath/fileName.ext ${DESTINATIONPATH[$i]}

    done
exit

回答17:

if you want to copy multiple folders to multiple folders one can do something like this:

echo dir1 dir2 dir3 | xargs -n 1 cp -r /path/toyourdir/{subdir1,subdir2,subdir3}

回答18:

If you need to be specific on into which folders to copy the file you can combine find with one or more greps. For example to replace any occurences of favicon.ico in any subfolder you can use:

find . | grep favicon\.ico | xargs -n 1 cp -f /root/favicon.ico

回答19:

This will copy to the immediate sub-directories, if you want to go deeper, adjust the -maxdepth parameter.

find . -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type d| xargs -n 1 cp -i index.html

If you don't want to copy to all directories, hopefully you can filter the directories you are not interested in. Example copying to all folders starting with a

find . -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type d| grep \/a |xargs -n 1 cp -i index.html

If copying to a arbitrary/disjoint set of directories you'll need Robert Gamble's suggestion.

回答20:

I like to copy a file into multiple directories as such: cp file1 /foo/; cp file1 /bar/; cp file1 /foo2/; cp file1 /bar2/ And copying a directory into other directories: cp -r dir1/ /foo/; cp -r dir1/ /bar/; cp -r dir1/ /foo2/; cp -r dir1/ /bar2/

I know it's like issuing several commands, but it works well for me when I want to type 1 line and walk away for a while.

回答21:

For example if you are in the parent directory of you destination folders you can do:

for i in $(ls); do cp sourcefile $i; done