we use “cp” command to copy files from one location to another. Then, we use “chmod”, and “chown” commands to change the permissions and ownership of a file, respectively. However, we can combine all these tasks into a single one-liner command, and still get the same result instead of running the three consecutive commands. This can be helpful when you want to do this on a regular basis, or within a script. i want this script because i want to 1 file in many folder with destination permission?
use --no-preserve to preserve the destination mode/ownership
cp --no-preserve=mode,ownership source_file destination_file
cp -p
from man of cp:
-p same as --preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps
--preserve[=ATTR_LIST]
preserve the specified attributes (default:
mode,ownership,timestamps), if possible additional attributes:
context, links, xattr, all
Related
Say that I have the folder /dir. Is there a command in bash that I can use so that after performing it, no one could create new files in /dir?
Edit: important to mention that after performing the command, there will be same permissions to the directory files as they were before. For example, if I have folder /dir with file a.txt in it - so after I use my desired command I cant create new files, but I can modify/delete a.txt if I want.
you could change the permission with chmod to only let people read the folders content.
chmod a-w /dir
Will remove all write permissions of all (ugo), but keep x (execute) and r (read) permissions intact.
Yes, it's pretty simple. Just chmod to read only. Here is a sample
chmod -R 0444 /path/to/your/dir/
Where the last 3 4's mean User-readonly, Group-readonly and others-readonly respectively.
I am copying files from source to location. The source is not owned by me and the permission for files at source is ----rwx---. The permission of files coped to destination directory which is owned by me is ----r-x---. The permission of destination directory is drwxrwsrwx. How do I have the files with same permission of destination directory. I tried "cp --no-preserve=all" but it did not work (still the same permission).
Try this:
cp --no-preserve=mode,ownership $backupfile $destination
Let me rephrase that to "How to preserve permissions of destination directory on copy?"
I can't take credit for the answer since I just combined a couple of answers I found on the wild. So here it comes.
Firstly
Permissions are generally not propagated by the directory that files are being copied into, rather new permissions are controlled by the user's umask. However when you copy a file from one location to another it's a bit of a special case where the user's umask is essentially ignored and the existing permissions on the file are preserved.
Which explains why you can't directly propagate the permissions of the src to the dst directory.
However, there is two-step workaround to this.
cp-metadata: Copy the attributes and only the attributes you want to preserve back to the source directory. Here is a quick script that can do this:
#!/bin/bash
# Filename: cp-metadata
myecho=echo
src_path="$1"
dst_path="$2"
find "$src_path" |
while read src_file; do
dst_file="$dst_path${src_file#$src_path}"
$myecho chmod --reference="$src_file" "$dst_file"
$myecho chown --reference="$src_file" "$dst_file"
$myecho touch --reference="$src_file" "$dst_file"
done
You can leave out the touch command if you don't want keep the timestamp.
Replace myecho=echo with myecho= to actually perform the commands.
Mind that this script should be run in sudo mode in order to be able
to run chown and chmod effectively
cp --preserve: After you have successfully run the first command
now it's time to copy the contents along with the attributes to the dst
directory.
--preserve[=ATTR_LIST]
preserve the specified attributes (default: mode,ownership,timestamps), if possible additional attributes: context, links, xattr, all
\cp -rfp $src_dir $dst_dir should do what you want.
I have a directory containing a set of subdirectories and files. I need to recursively copy all the content of this directory to all the subdirectories of another directory, also recursively.
How do I achieve this, preferably without using a script and only with the cp command?
You can write this in a script but you don't have to. Just write it line by line in the terminal:
# $TARGET is the directory containing subdirectories where you want to STORE the copies
# $SOURCE is the directory containing the subdirectories you want to COPY
for dir in $(ls $TARGET); do
cp -r $SOURCE/* $TARGET/$dir
done
Only uses cp and runs on both bash and zsh.
You can't. 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.
The first part of the command before the pipe instruct tar to create an archive of everything in the current directory and write it to standard output (the – in place of a file-name frequently indicates stdout).
tar cf - * | ( cd /target; tar xfp -)
The commands within parentheses cause the shell to change directory to the target directory and untar data from standard input. Since the cd and tar commands are contained within parentheses, their actions are performed together.
The -p option in the tar extraction command directs tar to preserve permission and ownership information, if possible given the user executing the command. If you are running the command as superuser, this option is turned on by default and can be omitted.
Also you can use the following command, but it seems to be quite slower than tar;
cp -a * /target
I have some different files with the same name and I want to copy all of them to the destination which has a flat structure (no directories, just files), is there any way to append some text onto one of the file names so that both can be copied.
Need to use rsync because there are some files that I need to exclude from the copy.
For example:
dir1/file1.txt
dir1/dir2/file1.txt
both get copied, and in the destination there is:
file1.txt
file1.txt.txt
typically, when I want to do some complex name-mungling, I just write the list of files (with find dir1 >listfiles) and fix it with a text editor.
for example, s/^.*\/([^\/]+)$/cp \0 destination/\1/ converts a file like
dir1/file1.txt
dir1/dir2/file1.txt
to a script like:
cp dir1/file1.txt destination/file1.txt
cp dir1/dir2/file1.txt destination/file1.txt
then you could do something like cut -f 3 <listfiles | sort | uniq -d to find those with the same destination filename. then go back to the editor and fix those lines.
After a few minutes you get a full script for exactly the copy you want, without surprises because you can see each command and apply the best fix for each case.
As far as i know there is no default option in rsync to do that. But i guess that since you are copying files with the same name but from different directories, you are using
multiple rsync commands.
So, this gives you two options:
Create folders..
rsync -av /home/user1/file1 /media/foo/user1/file1
rsync -av /home/user2/file1 /media/foo/user2/file1
etc..
or rename the files with an id
rsync -av /home/user1/file1 /media/foo/parent_dir-file1
rsync -av /home/user2file1 /media/foo/parent_dir-file1
etc..
If you want to use the second solution you can build a simple script. As you are using rsync i suppose that you know the basics on GNU-Linux, so a simple bash script would be enough!
A basic ID is to get the parent folder name and add it as variable to the path of the rsync command. ( it won't always work )
IF you want to be sure of a good id you can for example set a counter and increment like
file1-1
file1-2
file1-3
But you will loose the track of its absolute path.
All the solutions can work, its up to you to choice the one that feed your needs!
I am looking to do a specific copy in Fedora.
I have two folders:
'webroot': holding ALL web files/images etc
'export': folder containing thousands of PHP, CSS, JS documents that are exported from my SVN repo.
The export directory contains many of the same files/folders that the root does, however the root contains additional ones not found in export.
I'd like to merge all of the contents of export with my webroot with the following options:
Overwriting the file in webroot if export's version contains different code than what
is inside of webroot's version (live)
Preserve the permissions/users/groups of the file if it is overwritten (the export
version replacing the live version) *NOTE I would like the webroots permissions/ownership maintained, but with export's contents
No prompting/stopping of the copy
of any kind (ie not verbose)
Recursive copy - obviously I
would like to copy all* files
folders and subfolders found in
export
I've done a bit of research into cp - would this do the job?:
cp -pruf ./export /path/to/webroot
It might, but any time the corresponding files in export and webroot have the same content but different modification times, you'd wind up performing an unnecessary copy operation. You'd probably get slightly smarter behavior from rsync:
rsync -pr ./export /path/to/webroot
Besides, rsync can copy files from one host to another over an SSH connection, if you ever have a need to do that. Plus, it has a zillion options you can specify to tweak its behavior - look in the man page for details.
EDIT: with respect to your clarification about what you mean by preserving permissions: you'd probably want to leave off the -p option.
-u overwrites existing files folder if the destination is older than source
-p perserves the permission and dates
-f turns off verbosity
-r makes the copy recursive
So looks like you got all the correct args to cp
Sounds like a job for cpio (and hence, probably, GNU tar can do it too):
cd export
find . -print | cpio -pvdm /path/to/webroot
If you need owners preserved, you have to do it as root, of course. The -p option is 'pass mode', meaning copy between locations; -v is verbose (but not interactive; there's a difference); -d means create directories as necessary; -m means preserve modification time. By default, without the -u option, cpio won't overwrite files in the target area that are newer than the one from the source area.