How to replace all the contents from one folder with another one

Question

I have folders old and new.

I want to replace all the contents in old/* to new/*. There can be many subdirectories in those folders.

But there can be few files which are not in new/* but are in old/*, so I want them to stay as they are.

How can I do that from a Linux shell?

Answer 1

rsync would probably be a better option here. It's as simple as rsync -a subdir/ ./. check this unix.stackexchage answer for better solutions

use -f with the cp command

cp -fR /source/files /dest

suppress cp to overwrite" prompt..

To override cp's alias you can simply enclose it in quotes:

 'cp' -rf ./source/* /destination/

for more information follow these links:

http://www.wallpaperama.com/forums/cp-command-problems-forcing-overwrite-using-cp-command-t5685.html

http://bytes.com/topic/unix/answers/865372-force-cp-overwrite-existing-directory

Answer 2

Use rsync. It will synchronize the directories in one direction. So, if you want to update your old folder with everything from new, but keep what's in there, just use:

rsync -avh --dry-run /path/to/new/ /path/to/old/

This will, in a first instance, just output the list of files that would be transferred. In that case: Everything found in new will be copied to old, unless it's already there. Everything in old stays as it is.

If it looks fine to you, remove the --dry-run argument to transmit them for real.

The -avh flags just enable archive mode (which will preserve timestamps, etc.), verbosity and human-readable file-sizes. Nothing will be deleted from the destination unless you specify the --delete flag. Consult man rsync for more information.