Copy the content/file to all subdirectory in a directory using terminal

Question

I want to copy a file to all subfolders in a folder. How can I do this with the command line?

Solution 1

How to put a file in the current working directory in all subfolders (and maybe their subfolders, depending on what you want to do)

This will put the file in all of the subfolders, but not their subfolders:

for d in */; do cp water.txt "$d"; done

---

This will put the file water.txt (change all instances of water.txt to the filename you want to copy) in all the subfolders and their subfolders

for i in ./* # iterate over all files in current dir
do
    if [ -d "$i" ] # if it's a directory
    then
        cp water.txt "$i" # copy water.txt into it
    fi
done

Info from this linuxquestions thread

Solution 2

You could use that one-liner:

find <target-dir> -type d -exec cp <the file> {} \;

limit depth to 1 -> only the immediate directories

find <target-dir> -type d -maxdepth 1 -exec cp <the file> {} \;

Comments

[Anake]

This does all subdirectories recursively, not just the immediate subdirectories

[ortang]

@Anake updated my answer

[Jinhua Wang]

This answer is excellent!

[June Wang]

Hey, what if I only want to put water.txt in the end subfolder of tar_dir?

[Richard Tyler Miles]

I had to reverse flags -maxdepth 1 -type d on RHEL