Copying all files from one directory to all directories under same parent directory

Question

I have one parent directory /home/test and under that directory I have multiple directories. The names are server{1..10} and one of them server3 has few files which I have copied from remote server. I tried to use cp but it's not working for me. Is there a way to copy all files or one file from server3 directory to rest of the server directories under /home/test.

Answer 1

cp can handle multiple sources, but it can not handle multiple destinations.

You can use echo dir1 dir2 dir3 | xargs -n 1 cp file1 this will copy file1 to dir1, dir2 and dir3, for example.

Another modification is echo dir1 dir2 dir3 | xargs -n 1 cp /home/test/server3/* which will copy all of the files in a given directory to the echoed directories.

Additional solution, which is a bit shorter (w/o the need to enter directory names) is:

ls -1 | grep -v server3 | xargs -n 1 cp server3/*

Lastly, seems like a duplicate

Adding example for first solution:

# creating sample dir structure
[shadowe@shadow Desktop]$ mkdir server1
[shadowe@shadow Desktop]$ mkdir server2
[shadowe@shadow Desktop]$ mkdir server3
[shadowe@shadow Desktop]$ touch server3/test.one
[shadowe@shadow Desktop]$ touch server3/test.two
[shadowe@shadow Desktop]$ ls -R
./server1:
./server2:
./server3:
test.one  test.two

# executing solution
$ echo /home/shadowe/Desktop/server2/ /home/shadowe/Desktop/server1/ | xargs -n 1 cp /home/shadowe/Desktop/server3/*

# verifying solution
[shadowe@shadow Desktop]$ ls -R
./server1:
test.one  test.two
./server2:
test.one  test.two
./server3:
test.one  test.two

Adding example for second solution:

# showing directories structure and initial state
$ ls -R
server1:
server2:
server3:
test.one  test.two
server4:
server5:
server6:

# executing command
$ ls -1 | grep -v server3 | xargs -n 1 cp server3/*

# checking results
$ ls -R
./server1:
test.one  test.two
./server2:
test.one  test.two
./server3:
test.one  test.two
./server4:
test.one  test.two
./server5:
test.one  test.two
./server6:
test.one  test.two

As seen, both commands copied all of the files under server3 to other directories, so it's a matter of preference and use case.

Answer 2

If I'm understanding what you're after, the easiest way is a for loop:

myList="server1 server2 server4 server5 server6 server7 server8 server9 server10"
for myDir in $myList ; do cp server3/* $myDir/ ; done

Answer 3

The simplest way is to do this in one loop:

for i in ./server*; do cp ./server3/testfile* "${i}"; done

It will copy content of server3 directory to each directory in current path. This will also try to copy files to same directory but it only prints out that they are the same files and continues.

Edit: To avoid nasty error messages you can enhance for loop with more specific wildcard. For example to skip server3 use following: server[1-24-9]