How to copy a file to multiple folders using the command line?

Question

I have tried to copy a file test.txt to multiple directories with one command:

cp ~/test.txt ~/folder1 ~/folder2

But I didn't succeed. Is there a way to do that in one command so I can copy a file or even a folder to multiple directories?

Solution 1

cp can copy from multiple sources, but can't copy to multiple destinations. See man cp for more info.

The only bash command that I know which can copy/save to multiple destinations is tee.

You can use it in your case as follows:

tee ~/folder1/test.txt ~/folder2/test.txt < ~/test.txt

Note that tee also writes the input to the standard output (stdout). So if you don't want this, you can prevent it by redirecting standard output to /dev/null as follow:

tee ~/folder1/test.txt ~/folder2/test.txt < ~/test.txt >/dev/null

Solution 2

Another way to achieve a copy to multiple locations is the following command :

find dir1 dir2 -exec cp file.txt {} \;

If dir1 or dir2 have sub-directories that you don't want the file copied into, add -maxdepth 0option :

find dir1 dir2 -maxdepth 0 -exec cp file.txt {} \;

Note that this will overwrite every file in dir1 and dir2 with file.txt's contents, in addition to copying it. To only copy file.txt without affecting other files in these directories, tell find to only act on directories:

find dir1 dir2 -type d -exec cp file.txt {} \;

Solution 3

The command

cp ~/test.txt ~/folder1 ~/folder2

tries to copy two files (~/test.txt and ~/folder1) to the destination folder2. (And if ~/folder2 exists and is a directory you will have an "omitting directory" warning).

If you want to make multiple copies of the file test.txt, you have to use a loop or multiple commands...

for i in ~/folder1 ~/folder2; do cp  ~/test.txt $i; done 

(...and be careful if you have spaces embedded in the file names, you'll need quoting).

To copy whole directories you have to use the -r option:

for i in ~/folder1 ~/folder2; do cp -r ~/folder3 $i; done

this will create ~/folder1/folder3 and ~/folder2/folder3 with all the files included.

Solution 4

You can create a help script , or you can do it with xargs and a print function (in this case, echo ):

echo firstDir secondDir | xargs -n 1 cp test

This will make each directory as an argument to the cp function , using test file as a parameter.

Solution 5

After a long search this work like a Charm also !

for dir in *; do [ -d "$dir" ] && cp /path/file.txt "$dir" ; done

This will copy file.txt to every directory in your current location in terminal.

for dir in *; do [ -d "$dir" ] && cp -rf /path/folder "$dir" ; done

This will copy a folder to every sub directory in your current location in terminal.

I share it hope it helps others too .

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Comments

[Admin]

Not easily. You may want to look into "rsync" for efficiently updating multiple existing copies of a folder

[Admin]

Try learning a bit of bash-script. It can get very useful: for dest in folder1 folder2; do cp ~/test.txt ~/"$dest"; done

[Admin]

Not a single command but might just help some people who stumble upon here: cp ~/test.txt ~/folder1 && cp ~/test.txt ~/folder2

[Admin]

Duplicate of stackoverflow.com/a/195972/2097284.

[Admin]

@ManuJärvinen comment may look flippant but it raises an important point. Why complicate your script? Two separate lines with a single copy is much more readable than all the other answers. I have not used tee much so if I saw the accepted answer in a script, I would have no idea what it was doing. I accept the answers are inventive but in a real world scenario you need simple.

[terdon]

Clever, that's cheating! :)

[Radu Rădeanu]

@terdon Only if you consider that I/O redirection is an independent command :)

[Rmano]

+1, clever! And if you use the >/dev/null works with binary files too, without messing up the terminal...

[Danatela]

Nice solution! Seems to me more perfect than with tee.

[Sylvain Pineau]

Indeed, no redirection is involved and it's still one command.

[Radu Rădeanu]

@SylvainPineau In fact there are 3: one is find and for two times (in this case) cp. Not to say that find need a lot of time.

[nux]

+1 for you , your always ma man :) , but what if i want to copy a directory ?

[Radu Rădeanu]

@nux Your question was about a file. The other answers which uses cp in combination with other commands are good in case if you want to copy a directory.

[nux]

i will try answers and will report you the result , thanks man

[Radu Rădeanu]

@nux Don't forget to use -r option with cp in case of directories

[kojiro]

If the definition of a "command" is an "exec" call, maybe, but this is "one command" in my book.

[kojiro]

For the passing reader: According to the spec, a for loop is a compound command. Therefore this is still one command, and meets all the requirements for the question.

[Rmano]

In zsh, you can use for i in *(/); ... to loop over all the subdirectories, so you can avoid the [ -d ... test. Extended globbing is one of the reason I like it over bash.

[nux]

can your right the code again in a command

[Rmano]

In zsh, the first command of this answer can be simplified as for dir in *(/); do cp /path/file.txt "$dir"; done. See zsh.sourceforge.net/Intro/intro_2.html

[Michael Martinez]

technically two commands (find and cp) but no pipes so "looks" like one command ;-)

[Henk Langeveld]

@SylvainPineau This will also create one copy of the file for every subdirectory in dir1 and dir2.

[Henk Langeveld]

You can eliminate the test in any Bourne derived shell with for dir in */;

[Sylvain Pineau]

@Henk, if dir1 or dir2 have subdirectory, adding -maxdepth 0 to the find command will prevent this behaviour.

[Henk Langeveld]

Correct. I already edited your answer. Enjoy!

[jfs]

@nux: tee unlike cp copies only file's content ignoring its mode, ownership, timestamps. To avoid repeating the filename: f=text.txt; <~/$f tee ~/folder1/$f > ~/folder2/$f

[Rmano]

@nux, I do not agree on the corrections. 1) the two capitals are wrong, my intent was to interleave the commands into the phrase. 2) the ellipsis is a matter of style; please let my style in.

[nux]

ok , am sorry man , i thought it will look better .

[Jonathan]

I keep coming back to this one, so thought I should give an upvote :D

[nukeguy]

@nux This works really well and the command is very easy to follow. It should be voted much higher!

[Elder Geek]

I love tee almost as much as coffee! ;-)

[alpha_989]

on my system, it doesnt save folder3 as ~/folder1/folder3, but rather copies everything in folder3 into folder1

[Dennis Williamson]

A way to avoid repeating the filename and the common part of the directory names, too!: f=text.txt; tee ~/folder{1..2}/$f < ~/$f > /dev/null

[Bryson S.]

This is probably the best/most direct answer to the question

[jedmao]

i just ran tee packages/*/.npmrc < .npmrc in a monorepo. you saved my life!

[Timo]

in zsh it truncated all files with tee.

[Zanna]

cp has a --verbose or -v flag which I find useful for scripts. One can also do a dry run with echo before the command ( do echo cp ...) and then remove the echo if the list is as expected, though running without sudo is also a convenient test for this particular scenario.