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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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).

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
   

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

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

This will copy to the immediate sub-directories, if you want to go deeper, adjust the -maxdepth parameter.

find . -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type d| xargs -n 1 cp -i index.html

If you don't want to copy to all directories, hopefully you can filter the directories you are not interested in. Example copying to all folders starting with a

find . -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type d| grep \/a |xargs -n 1 cp -i index.html

If copying to a arbitrary/disjoint set of directories you'll need Robert Gamble's suggestion.

I like to copy a file into multiple directories as such: cp file1 /foo/; cp file1 /bar/; cp file1 /foo2/; cp file1 /bar2/ And copying a directory into other directories: cp -r dir1/ /foo/; cp -r dir1/ /bar/; cp -r dir1/ /foo2/; cp -r dir1/ /bar2/

I know it's like issuing several commands, but it works well for me when I want to type 1 line and walk away for a while.

For example if you are in the parent directory of you destination folders you can do:

for i in $(ls); do cp sourcefile $i; done