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         


        

Answer 1

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 2

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.

Answer 3

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

Answer 4

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 5

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

Answer 6

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}