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?

Answer 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

Answer 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 {} \;

Answer 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.

(Learnt 8 years further down the line: notice that you must be careful with spaces in file names. If you have them, change $i with "$i", and be careful about quoting them).

Answer 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.

Answer 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 .

Answer 6

If you want to copy the file test.txt in every directory in /tmp/target/ ...

create a test environment:

mkdir /tmp/target
cd /tmp/target
mkdir -v {folder1,folder2,folder3}
touch test.txt

copy it:

find * -maxdepth 0 -type d -exec cp -vi test.txt {} \;

Answer 7

Just thought to give a variation to the answer of Sylvain Pineau

where dir1 and dir2 are not in your current directory.

find ./ -maxdepth 2 -type d -name dir1 -exec cp file.txt {} \;

here find will look for dir1 two levels deep or you can leave out -maxdepth parameter to find dir1 in all folders in current directory and below it.

Answer 8

For files only without preserving attributes. Great if you're copying huge files and only want to read them once:

cat file1 >file2 >file3

For files or directories

xargs -n 1 cp file1 <<< 'file2 file3'
xargs -n 1 cp -r dir1 <<< 'dir2 dir3'

Answer 9

I needed to post html index files in the home directory of 10 newly created sub-domains. I created a file with the markup called sites-index and placed it in my working directory and another called sites-home that contained a list of full paths to the copied files on each line (eg /var/path/to/site1/public_html/index.html).

After a bit of searching here I lighted on the following bash script:

while read file; do cp sites-index "$file"; done < sites-home

The script loops through the list, copies the html file at each iteration and sets each line in the list as the new path to which the html is copied.

To run in terminal, type sudo -i to start a root shell (enter your password when prompted). Execute the script.

Alternatively, you can save the command in a text file, for example index.sh and invoke it by typing at the terminal prompt, sudo bash index.sh.

If you run the script without sudo you'll see a list of the files that weren't created due to insufficient permission. If it executes correctly your files will be created without notice.

Answer 10

parallel cp foo {} ::: */ will copy foo to all the directories in the current directory in parallel:

$ cd "$(mktemp --directory)"
$ mkdir a 'b c'
$ touch foo
$ parallel cp foo {} ::: */
$ ls --recursive 
.:
 a  'b c'   foo

./a:
foo

'./b c':
foo

Useful if you want to do this quickly. Just remember that you need to quote the command or double-escape, for example:

$ cd "$(mktemp --directory)"
$ mkdir 'a b' 'c d' 'e f'
$ touch 'a b/foo'
$ parallel "cp 'a b/foo' {}" ::: 'c d' 'e f'
$ ls --recursive 
.:
'a b'  'c d'  'e f'

'./a b':
foo

'./c d':
foo

'./e f':
foo