How to copy a file to multiple directories using the gnu cp command [closed]

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.

Wildcards also work with Roberts code

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

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

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.

These answers all seem more complicated than the obvious:

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

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

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).

If you want to do it without a forked command:

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

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.

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.

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

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

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
   

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).

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

The shortest & easiest way to copy a file to multiple directories using gnu cp command:

$ ls -db *folders*|xargs -n1 cp -v *files*

Explanation of the commands:
ls -db keeps white space intact when piping & prints every directory that matches the name: [*folders*]
| takes standard output from everything to the left & pipes it into standard input of everything to the right
xargs -n1 iterates once over the list of each printed directory matched
cp -v makes a verbose copy (for easy verification) of every file that matches the name: [*files*]

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}

If all your target directories match a path expression — like they're all subdirectories of path/to — then just use find in combination with cp like this:

find ./path/to/* -type d -exec cp [file name] {} \;

That's it.

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