Copy file along with creating directory

Question

I have a file in a directory as /a/b/c/xxxxx.sql

I have another directory, /a/b/d, having no further subdirectories.

How should I copy xxxxx.sql into /a/b/d, to have the new file with directory as /a/b/d/c/xxxxx.sql, in a single command?

Answer 1

With the install command:

install -D -m644 /a/b/c/xxxxx.sql /a/b/d/c/xxxxx.sql

From man install:

install - copy files and set attributes

You can chose the Unix rights by modifying 644 by what you want, default is 755 as that command is primarily intended for software deployment. The umask is ignored.

The command will transparently create all the directory structure if not exists with -D switch:

-D

Create all leading components of DEST except the last, or all components of --target-directory, then copy SOURCE to DEST

The directories that are created in the process will always have rwxr-xr-x (755) permissions (though possibly affected by setgid bits and default ACLs) regardless of the umask. Directories that were already there won't have their permissions modified.

Answer 2

Using GNU cp, do the copy from the starting point of the path you want to see reflected in the new directory and use the --parents option:

cd /a/b &&
  cp --parents c/foo d

Example:

% cp --parents c/foo d --verbose
c -> d/c
'c/foo' -> 'd/c/foo'

To make it a single command:

{ cd /a/b && cp --parents c/foo d; } # compound command
env -C /a/b cp --parents c/foo d  # simple command assuming BSD/GNU env

With -a, cp will copy all attributes from the source including file type, permissions, ACLs, extended attributes, sparseness and ownership if permitted by the system, both for the c directory and the foo file.

Answer 3

You can use rsync relative option.

rsync --relative /a/b/./c/xxxxx.sql /a/b/d/

Note that . separates where --relative path should start.

To move the whole directory (c), don't forget to add --recursive flag to copy these files recursively.

Answer 4

In addition to rsync, tar will do what you need:

tar cf - -C /a/b c/xxxxxx.sql | tar xpf - -C /a/b/d

An example:

$ mkdir -p /a/b/c /a/b/d
$ touch /a/b/c/xxxxxx.sql
$ tar cf - -C /a/b c/xxxxxx.sql | tar xpf - -C /a/b/d
$ find /a/b
/a/b
/a/b/c
/a/b/c/xxxxxx.sql
/a/b/d
/a/b/d/c
/a/b/d/c/xxxxxx.sql

Answer 5

You can roll your own command too. Here's a function implementation but you could equally drop a variant of this into an executable script somewhere along your $PATH

mdcopy() {
    mkdir -p -- "$2" &&
        cp -p -- "$1" "$2"
}

Usage

mdcopy /a/b/c/xxxxx.sql /a/b/d/c

An advantage of this approach is that you can have the utility to exactly what you want. This implementation requires a directory as its second argument but you could equally adapt it to expect a file pathname as the second argument. It's whatever works best for you.