Standard concise way to copy a file in Java?

Question

It has always bothered me that the only way to copy a file in Java involves opening streams, declaring a buffer, reading in one file, looping through it, and writing it out to the other steam. The web is littered with similar, yet still slightly different implementations of this type of solution.

Is there a better way that stays within the bounds of the Java language (meaning does not involve exec-ing OS specific commands)? Perhaps in some reliable open source utility package, that would at least obscure this underlying implementation and provide a one line solution?

Answer 1

To copy a file and save it to your destination path you can use the method below.

public void copy(File src, File dst) throws IOException {
    InputStream in = new FileInputStream(src);
    try {
        OutputStream out = new FileOutputStream(dst);
        try {
            // Transfer bytes from in to out
            byte[] buf = new byte[1024];
            int len;
            while ((len = in.read(buf)) > 0) {
                out.write(buf, 0, len);
            }
        } finally {
            out.close();
        }
    } finally {
        in.close();
    }
}

Answer 2

Fast and work with all the versions of Java also Android:

private void copy(final File f1, final File f2) throws IOException {
    f2.createNewFile();

    final RandomAccessFile file1 = new RandomAccessFile(f1, "r");
    final RandomAccessFile file2 = new RandomAccessFile(f2, "rw");

    file2.getChannel().write(file1.getChannel().map(FileChannel.MapMode.READ_ONLY, 0, f1.length()));

    file1.close();
    file2.close();
}

Answer 3

A little late to the party, but here is a comparison of the time taken to copy a file using various file copy methods. I looped in through the methods for 10 times and took an average. File transfer using IO streams seem to be the worst candidate:

Here are the methods:

private static long fileCopyUsingFileStreams(File fileToCopy, File newFile) throws IOException {
    FileInputStream input = new FileInputStream(fileToCopy);
    FileOutputStream output = new FileOutputStream(newFile);
    byte[] buf = new byte[1024];
    int bytesRead;
    long start = System.currentTimeMillis();
    while ((bytesRead = input.read(buf)) > 0)
    {
        output.write(buf, 0, bytesRead);
    }
    long end = System.currentTimeMillis();

    input.close();
    output.close();

    return (end-start);
}

private static long fileCopyUsingNIOChannelClass(File fileToCopy, File newFile) throws IOException
{
    FileInputStream inputStream = new FileInputStream(fileToCopy);
    FileChannel inChannel = inputStream.getChannel();

    FileOutputStream outputStream = new FileOutputStream(newFile);
    FileChannel outChannel = outputStream.getChannel();

    long start = System.currentTimeMillis();
    inChannel.transferTo(0, fileToCopy.length(), outChannel);
    long end = System.currentTimeMillis();

    inputStream.close();
    outputStream.close();

    return (end-start);
}

private static long fileCopyUsingApacheCommons(File fileToCopy, File newFile) throws IOException
{
    long start = System.currentTimeMillis();
    FileUtils.copyFile(fileToCopy, newFile);
    long end = System.currentTimeMillis();
    return (end-start);
}

private static long fileCopyUsingNIOFilesClass(File fileToCopy, File newFile) throws IOException
{
    Path source = Paths.get(fileToCopy.getPath());
    Path destination = Paths.get(newFile.getPath());
    long start = System.currentTimeMillis();
    Files.copy(source, destination, StandardCopyOption.REPLACE_EXISTING);
    long end = System.currentTimeMillis();

    return (end-start);
}

The only drawback what I can see while using NIO channel class is that I still can't seem to find a way to show intermediate file copy progress.

Answer 4

Available as standard in Java 7, path.copyTo: http://openjdk.java.net/projects/nio/javadoc/java/nio/file/Path.html http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/essential/io/copy.html

I can't believe it took them so long to standardise something so common and simple as file copying :(

Answer 5

NIO copy with a buffer is the fastest according to my test. See the working code below from a test project of mine at https://github.com/mhisoft/fastcopy

import java.io.Closeable;
import java.io.File;
import java.io.FileInputStream;
import java.io.FileOutputStream;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.nio.ByteBuffer;
import java.nio.channels.FileChannel;
import java.text.DecimalFormat;


public class test {

private static final int BUFFER = 4096*16;
static final DecimalFormat df = new DecimalFormat("#,###.##");
public static void nioBufferCopy(final File source, final File target )  {
    FileChannel in = null;
    FileChannel out = null;
    double  size=0;
    long overallT1 =  System.currentTimeMillis();

    try {
        in = new FileInputStream(source).getChannel();
        out = new FileOutputStream(target).getChannel();
        size = in.size();
        double size2InKB = size / 1024 ;
        ByteBuffer buffer = ByteBuffer.allocateDirect(BUFFER);

        while (in.read(buffer) != -1) {
            buffer.flip();

            while(buffer.hasRemaining()){
                out.write(buffer);
            }

            buffer.clear();
        }
        long overallT2 =  System.currentTimeMillis();
        System.out.println(String.format("Copied %s KB in %s millisecs", df.format(size2InKB),  (overallT2 - overallT1)));
    }
    catch (IOException e) {
        e.printStackTrace();
    }

    finally {
        close(in);
        close(out);
    }
}

private static void close(Closeable closable)  {
    if (closable != null) {
        try {
            closable.close();
        } catch (IOException e) {
            if (FastCopy.debug)
                e.printStackTrace();
        }    
    }
}

}

Answer 6

As toolkit mentions above, Apache Commons IO is the way to go, specifically FileUtils.copyFile(); it handles all the heavy lifting for you.

And as a postscript, note that recent versions of FileUtils (such as the 2.0.1 release) have added the use of NIO for copying files; NIO can significantly increase file-copying performance, in a large part because the NIO routines defer copying directly to the OS/filesystem rather than handle it by reading and writing bytes through the Java layer. So if you're looking for performance, it might be worth checking that you are using a recent version of FileUtils.