cp command failing in Linux

Question

I am facing a copy command problem while executing shell script in RHEL 5.

executed command is

cp -fp /fir1/dir2/*/bin/file1 `find . -name file1 -print`

error is

cp: Target ./6e0476aec9667638c87da1b17b6ccf46/file1 must be a directory

Would you please throw some ideas why it would be failing?

Thanks Robert.

Answer 1

When cp is called with more than two filenames as arguments, it treats the last one as a target directory, and copies all the files named in the other arguments into that target directory. So, for example,

cp file1 file2 dir3

will create dir3/file1 and dir3/file2 . It seems that in your case, the pattern /fir1/dir2/*/bin/file1 matches more than one filename, so cp is trying to treat the result of find as a target directory - which it isn't - and failing.

Answer 2

You can't copy many files to one location unless that location is a directory.

cp should be used thusly: cp sourcefile destinationfile or cp source1 source2 destinationdir .

Answer 3

As the others said you cannot copy multiple files to one file using cp . On the other hand, if you want to append the content of multiple files together into one destination file you can use cat .

For instance:

cat file1 file2 file3 > destinationfile

Answer 4

it is hard to answer without knowing what you are trying to achieve.

If, for example, you want to copy all files named "file1" within a directory structure to a target place /tmp, building the same directory structure there, this command will do the trick:

cd /dir1/dir2
find . -name file1 | cpio -pvd /tmp

Answer 5

You cannot copy multiple multiple files to a file, only to a directory, ie

cp file1 file2 file2 file4 

is not possible, you need

cp file1 file2 file2 dir1