In bash I need to do this:
take all files in a directory copy them into an existing directory
How do I do this? I tried cp -r t1 t2
(both t1 and t2 are existing directories, t1 has files in it) but it created a directory called t1 inside t2, I don't want that, I need the files in t1 to go directly inside t2. How do I do this?
cp
questions can well be seen as bash
questions, which is a programming language. I have never seen a Python question talking about file copy be closed.
What you want is:
cp -R t1/. t2/
The dot at the end tells it to copy the contents of the current directory, not the directory itself. This method also includes hidden files and folders.
cp dir1/* dir2
Or if you have directories inside dir1 that you'd want to copy as well
cp -r dir1/* dir2
dir1/.*
is not a good idea, as it copies dir1/.. (i.e. the parent of the directory you're actually trying to copy). It also copies dir1/. which is fine, except that it's already (mostly) been copied, so you're doing the work twice.
dir1/.*
/hidden files problem by cd-ing into the directory you want to copy from, and then referring to it as .
. So, if you want to copy all files including hidden files from a directory into an existing directory, you can: cd [source dir]
, cp . [path to destination dir, with no trailing slash]
.
If you want to copy something from one directory into the current directory, do this:
cp dir1/* .
This assumes you're not trying to copy hidden files.
Assuming t1 is the folder with files in it, and t2 is the empty directory. What you want is something like this:
sudo cp -R t1/* t2/
Bear in mind, for the first example, t1 and t2 have to be the full paths, or relative paths (based on where you are). If you want, you can navigate to the empty folder (t2) and do this:
sudo cp -R t1/* ./
Or you can navigate to the folder with files (t1) and do this:
sudo cp -R ./* t2/
Note: The * sign (or wildcard) stands for all files and folders. The -R flag means recursively (everything inside everything).
For inside some directory, this will be use full as it copy all contents from "folder1" to new directory "folder2" inside some directory.
$(pwd) will get path for current directory.
Notice the dot (.) after folder1 to get all contents inside folder1
cp -r $(pwd)/folder1/. $(pwd)/folder2
cp -R t1/ t2
The trailing slash on the source directory changes the semantics slightly, so it copies the contents but not the directory itself. It also avoids the problems with globbing and invisible files that Bertrand's answer has (copying t1/*
misses invisible files, copying `t1/* t1/.*' copies t1/. and t1/.., which you don't want).
$ mkdir t1
$ mkdir t2
$ touch t1/one
$ touch t1/two
$ touch t1/.three
$ cp -R t1/ t2
$ ls t2/
t1
(sorry no codeformat in comments, readable version at pastebin.com/yszSxV6G)
Nov, 2021 Update:
This code with Flag "-R" copies perfectly all the contents of "folder1" to existing "folder2":
cp -R folder1/. folder2
Flag "-R" copies symbolic links as well but Flag "-r" skips symbolic links so Flag "-R" is better than Flag "-r".
The latest GNU Grep 3.7:
-R, --dereference-recursive
For each directory operand, read and process all files in that directory,
recursively, following all symbolic links.
-r, --recursive
For each directory operand, read and process all files in that directory,
recursively. Follow symbolic links on the command line, but skip symlinks
that are encountered recursively. Note that if no file operand is given,
grep searches the working directory. This is the same as the
‘--directories=recurse’ option.
Depending on some details you might need to do something like this:
r=$(pwd)
case "$TARG" in
/*) p=$r;;
*) p="";;
esac
cd "$SRC" && cp -r . "$p/$TARG"
cd "$r"
... this basically changes to the SRC directory and copies it to the target, then returns back to whence ever you started.
The extra fussing is to handle relative or absolute targets.
(This doesn't rely on subtle semantics of the cp
command itself ... about how it handles source specifications with or without a trailing / ... since I'm not sure those are stable, portable, and reliable beyond just GNU cp
and I don't know if they'll continue to be so in the future).
the correct option should be -T
. used with -r
to copy recursively.
$ cp -r -T t1 t2
Success story sharing
mv
. Does anyone know why?