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.
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.
Get all sub-directories names through ls and save them to some temporary file say, allFolders.txt
ls > allFolders.txt
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
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 $i; done
Related
I have bash script that that loops through files in the raw folder and puts them into the audio folder. This works just fine.
#!/bin/bash
PATH_IN=('/nas/data/customers/test2/raw/')
PATH_OUT=('/nas/data/customers/test2/audio/')
mkdir -p /nas/data/customers/test2/audio
IFS=$'\n'
find $PATH_IN -type f -name '*.wav' -exec basename {} \; | while read -r file; do
sox -S ${PATH_IN}${file} -e signed-integer ${PATH_OUT}${file}
done
My issue is that, as the folders grow I do not want to run the script on the files that has already been converted, so I would like to loop over only the files that has not been converted yet. I.e the files only in raw but not in audio.
I found the function
diff audio raw
That can I do just that, but I cannot find a good way to incorporate this into my bash script. Any help or nudges in the right direction would be highly appreciated.
You could do:
diff <(ls -1a $PATH_OUT) <(ls -1a $PATH_IN) | grep -E ">" | sed -E 's/> //'
The first part will diff the files on both folders, the second part will filter out to get only the additions, and the third one will clean the list from the diff symbols to get just the names.
I have 5 files called file1.txt, file2.txt ... file5.txt and I would like to move each one into a respective directory called dir1, dir2 ... dir5.
So file1.txt is moved into dir1, file2.txt is moved into dir2 and so on.
Is there a way to do this in one line at the command line, using mv and xargs perhaps?
I'm only suggesting xargs because I quite like this answer provided by Robert Gamble to a question asking how to copy one file to multiple directories.
echo dir1 dir2 dir3 | xargs -n 1 cp file1
I would personally prefer a solution that relies on a for loop, e.g.:
for n in {1..5}; do echo mv -- "file$n.txt" "dir$n/"; done
# ^^^^ remove that
This can be done with xargs but I find the solution to be less elegant:
seq 1 5 | xargs -n1 -I{} echo mv -- "file{}.txt" "dir{}/"
# ^^^^ remove that
Another way you could do it, if it weren't necessarily a list of consecutive integers, and dir* didn't necessarily already exist.
for f in *.txt; do mkdir dir${f: -5:1}; mv $f dir${f: -5:1}/; done
Using GNU Parallel you would so:
parallel mv {} {=s/file/dir/=} ::: *.txt
The command
ls -l | egrep '^d'
Lists all the Directories in the CWD..
And this command
cp a.txt /folder
copies a file a.txt to the folder named "folder"
Now what should i do to combine the 2 command so that the file a.txt gets copied to all the folders in the CWD.
The cp command does not take several destinations, but you could always try:
for DEST in `command here` ; do cp a.txt "$DEST" ; done
The command inside the backticks could be a command that produces a list of directories on standard output, but I doubt that ls -l | egrep '^d' is such a command. Anyway, the title of your question being about combining ls and cp commands, this my answer. To actually achieve what you want to do, you would be better off using find.
Something like find . -maxdepth 1 -type d ! -name "." -exec cp a.txt {} \; may do what you actually want. The find command is a special case in that is has a -exec option to combine itself with other commands easily. You could also have used (but this other version fails when there are lots of directories):
for DEST in `find . -maxdepth 1 -type d ! -name "."` ; do cp a.txt "$DEST" ; done
Don't use ls in scripts. Use a wildcard instead.
You'll have to loop over the target directories, since cp copies to one destination at a time.
for d in */; do
if ! [ -h "${d%/}" ]; then
cp a.txt "$d"
fi
done
The pattern */ matches all directories in the current directory (unless their name starts with a .), as well as symbolic links to directories. The test over ${d%/} ($d without the final /) excludes symbolic links.
I am new to Linux. I am trying to write a shell script which will move files to certain folders based on their extension, like for example in my downloads folder, I have all files of mixed file types. I have written the following script
mv *.mp3 ../Music
mv *.ogg ../Music
mv *.wav ../Music
mv *.mp4 ../Videos
mv *.flv ../Videos
How can I make it run automatically when a file is added to this folder? Now I have to manually run the script each time.
One more question, is there any way of combining these 2 statements
mv *.mp3 ../../Music
mv *.ogg ../../Music
into a single statement? I tried using || (C programming 'or' operator) and comma but they don't seem to work.
There is no trigger for when a file is added to a directory. If the file is uploaded via a webpage, you might be able to make the webpage do it.
You can put a script in crontab to do this, on unix machines (or task schedular in windows). Google crontab for a how-to.
As for combining your commands, use the following:
mv *.mp3 *.ogg ../../Music
You can include as many different "globs" (filenames with wildcards) as you like. The last thing should be the target directory.
Two ways:
find . -name '*mp3' -or -name '*ogg' -print | xargs -J% mv % ../../Music
find . -name '*mp3' -or -name '*ogg' -exec mv {} ../Music \;
The first uses a pipe and may run out of argument space; while the second may use too many forks and be slower. But, both will work.
Another way is:
mv -v {*.mp3,*.ogg,*.wav} ../Music
mv -v {*.mp4,*.flv} ../Videos
PS: option -v shows what is going on (verbose).
I like this method:
#!/bin/bash
for filename in *; do
if [[ -f "$filename" ]]; then
base=${filename%.*}
ext=${filename#$base.}
mkdir -p "${ext}"
mv "$filename" "${ext}"
fi
done
incron will watch the filesystem and perform run commands upon certain events.
You can combine multiple commands on a single line by using a command separator. The unconditional serialized command separator is ;.
command1 ; command2
You can use for loop to traverse through folders and subfolders inside the source folder.
The following code will help you move files in pair from "/source/foler/path/" to "/destination/fodler/path/". This code will move file matching their name and having different extensions.
for d in /source/folder/path/*; do
ls -tr $d |grep txt | rev | cut -f 2 -d '.' | rev | uniq | head -n 4 | xargs -I % bash -c 'mv -v '$d'/%.{txt,csv} /destination/folder/path/'
sleep 30
done
If we want to delete all files and directories we use, rm -rf *.
But what if i want all files and directories be deleted at a shot, except one particular file?
Is there any command for that? rm -rf * gives the ease of deletion at one shot, but deletes even my favourite file/directory.
Thanks in advance
find can be a very good friend:
$ ls
a/ b/ c/
$ find * -maxdepth 0 -name 'b' -prune -o -exec rm -rf '{}' ';'
$ ls
b/
$
Explanation:
find * -maxdepth 0: select everything selected by * without descending into any directories
-name 'b' -prune: do not bother (-prune) with anything that matches the condition -name 'b'
-o -exec rm -rf '{}' ';': call rm -rf for everything else
By the way, another, possibly simpler, way would be to move or rename your favourite directory so that it is not in the way:
$ ls
a/ b/ c/
$ mv b .b
$ ls
a/ c/
$ rm -rf *
$ mv .b b
$ ls
b/
Short answer
ls | grep -v "z.txt" | xargs rm
Details:
The thought process for the above command is :
List all files (ls)
Ignore one file named "z.txt" (grep -v "z.txt")
Delete the listed files other than z.txt (xargs rm)
Example
Create 5 files as shown below:
echo "a.txt b.txt c.txt d.txt z.txt" | xargs touch
List all files except z.txt
ls|grep -v "z.txt"
a.txt
b.txt
c.txt
d.txt
We can now delete(rm) the listed files by using the xargs utility :
ls|grep -v "z.txt"|xargs rm
You can type it right in the command-line or use this keystroke in the script
files=`ls -l | grep -v "my_favorite_dir"`; for file in $files; do rm -rvf $file; done
P.S. I suggest -i switch for rm to prevent delition of important data.
P.P.S You can write the small script based on this solution and place it to the /usr/bin (e.g. /usr/bin/rmf). Now you can use it as and ordinary app:
rmf my_favorite_dir
The script looks like (just a sketch):
#!/bin/sh
if [[ -z $1 ]]; then
files=`ls -l`
else
files=`ls -l | grep -v $1`
fi;
for file in $files; do
rm -rvi $file
done;
At least in zsh
rm -rf ^filename
could be an option, if you only want to preserve one single file.
If it's just one file, one simple way is to move that file to /tmp or something, rm -Rf the directory and then move it back. You could alias this as a simple command.
The other option is to do a find and then grep out what you don't want (using -v or directly using one of finds predicates) and then rming the remaining files.
For a single file, I'd do the former. For anything more, I'd write something custom similar to what thkala said.
In bash you have the !() glob operator, which inverts the matched pattern. So to delete everything except the file my_file_name.txt, try this:
shopt -s extglob
rm -f !(my_file_name.txt)
See this article for more details:
http://karper.wordpress.com/2010/11/17/deleting-all-files-in-a-directory-with-exceptions/
I don't know of such a program, but I have wanted it in the past for some times. The basic syntax would be:
IFS='
' for f in $(except "*.c" "*.h" -- *); do
printf '%s\n' "$f"
done
The program I have in mind has three modes:
exact matching (with the option -e)
glob matching (default, like shown in the above example)
regex matching (with the option -r)
It takes the patterns to be excluded from the command line, followed by the separator --, followed by the file names. Alternatively, the file names might be read from stdin (if the option -s is given), each on a line.
Such a program should not be hard to write, in either C or the Shell Command Language. And it makes a good excercise for learning the Unix basics. When you do it as a shell program, you have to watch for filenames containing whitespace and other special characters, of course.
I see a lot of longwinded means here, that work, but with
a/ b/ c/ d/ e/
rm -rf *.* !(b*)
this removes everything except directory b/ and its contents (assuming your file is in b/.
Then just cd b/ and
rm -rf *.* !(filename)
to remove everything else, but the file (named "filename") that you want to keep.
mv subdir/preciousfile ./
rm -rf subdir
mkdir subdir
mv preciousfile subdir/
This looks tedious, but it is rather safe
avoids complex logic
never use rm -rf *, its results depend on your current directory (which could be / ;-)
never use a globbing *: its expansion is limited by ARGV_MAX.
allows you to check the error after each command, and maybe avoid the disaster caused by the next command.
avoids nasty problems caused by space or NL in the filenames.
cd ..
ln trash/useful.file ./
rm -rf trash/*
mv useful.file trash/
you need to use regular expression for this. Write a regular expression which selects all other files except the one you need.