copy file to all subfolders and all subsubfolders

Question

Copy a file into all subfolders and subsubfolders.

I have a file say, a.txt

I want to copy it to all subfolders and all the folders within those folders. I have tried creating a script to run this, but I keeping getting errors.

Any help?

the code i was trying was below. But this only copies it into subdirectories, not subsubdirectories

for i in ./* # iterate over all files in current dir
do
    if [ -d "$i" ] # if it's a directory
    then
        cp a.txt "$i" # copy a.txt into it
    fi
done
        cd ..
    done

Answer 1

Your script only copies into subdirectories because that's all you are telling it to do (./* is all files in current directory, and you never go any deeper). You could implement it recursively, but it's probably easier to just do something like:

find . -mindepth 1 -type d -exec cp a.txt {} \;

Or, for POSIX compliance and maximum portability:

find . ! -path . -type d -exec cp a.txt {} \;

That will do what you want: copy a.txt to every (sub)+directory in the current tree.

You can use the -maxdepth option to limit the depth of subdirectories if you want. You can use the -mindepth option (where available) to set a minimum depth limit. In the first example above we use -mindepth 1 to skip . to avoid outputting a warning about copying a file onto itself -- it's not absolutely necessary but it's nice to not have warnings.

For more information about find check out its man page.