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

Question

Is it possible to copy a single file to multiple directories using the cp command ?

I tried the following , which did not work:

cp file1 /foo/ /bar/
cp file1 {/foo/,/bar}

I know it's possible using a for loop, or find. But is it possible using the gnu cp command?

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

No, cp can copy multiple sources but will only copy to a single destination. You need to arrange to invoke cp multiple times - once per destination - for what you want to do; using, as you say, a loop or some other tool.

Answer 3

Wildcards also work with Roberts code

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

Answer 4

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

Answer 5

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.

Answer 6

These answers all seem more complicated than the obvious:

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

Answer 7

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

Answer 8

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).

Answer 9

If you want to do it without a forked command:

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

Answer 10

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.