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Say I have two folders with various content, foo and bar. How can I merge bar into foo so that:

  • Files in foo that are not in bar are untouched.
  • Files in bar that are not in foo are now in foo.
  • Files in foo that are also in bar have been replaced by the files from bar.
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If I'm reading your requirements correctly, there's no files that go from foo to bar. It looks like you can just copy the contents of bar to foo, letting it overwrite files as necessary (its default behavior).

$ cp -R /path/to/bar/* /path/to/foo
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Yeah, what I was uncertain about was the recursiveness and how to not end up with just having bar inside foo as foo/bar. But this seems to be what I want :) – Svish Feb 7 '11 at 12:57
Right, if you just did cp -R /path/to/bar /path/to/foo it would create a directory bar inside foo. Subtle point. – coneslayer Feb 7 '11 at 13:20
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