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Does anyone know of any software or hardware (or both) that will copy a certain set of files to multiple USB flash drives?

We have a project where there are some PDF's that need to be copied to about 200 USB flash drives and I am not sure what the fastest way to that would be.

I work on a Mac OSX, but I do have access to a Windows machine as well.

Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks!

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  • Sounds like a job for scripts. If you're sure that the Drive letter for the flash drives will be constant, you can have someone write up a script so now your workflow will become like this; Plug flash drive, run script, unplug flash drive. Same thing but saves a few steps and a little bit of time. Mar 4, 2013 at 16:08
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    1. Please rephrase your question in a way that asks how to accomplish those tasks. Software and hardware recommendations are off topic on SU, and your question might get closed as is. 2. If you have N USB ports, you can process N drives at once. Is this what you're looking for? 3. Macs are PCs since Mac OS X. Your other OS is Windows?
    – Dennis
    Mar 4, 2013 at 16:13

1 Answer 1

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Under Linux (e.g., Mac OS X), this is pretty easy with a shell script.

Assuming that your USB drives (and only your USB drives) are mounted in /media, you can use a simple for loop:

for device in /media/*; do
    // copy instructions here
    // e.g., cp file "$device"
done

If you have 10 USB slots, this will allow you to process 10 drives at once.

The above for loop will copy the files sequentially, i.e., it will process the first flash drive, then start with the second one. If you have to copy a large amount of data, you can also copy the files in parallel:

unset PIDS

for device in /media/*; do
    // a single copy instruction here
    // e.g., cp file1 file2 file 3 "$device" &
done

wait

The ampersand after the copy instruction makes it execute in the background, i.e., the rest of the for loop is executed immediately. The command wait delays the script until all background processes have finished.

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  • I don't know much about OS X's default mount points. If the above doesn't work for you, please tell me where the drives get mounted.
    – Dennis
    Mar 4, 2013 at 16:20
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    Oooh, thanks! Yeah, I was just doing some more digging and I did find an Aleratec 1:10 device as well. So maybe that might help. Thanks, I'll try this out! Mar 4, 2013 at 16:20

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