Popular:
 Building Resilient Systems on AWS: Learn how to design and implement a resilient, highly available, fault-tolerant infrastructure on AWS.

Copy a Directory from Command Line

By  on  

Copying a directory for the sake of backup is something I do often, especially when I'm trying to figure out why something isn't working when I use an external library.  I'll copy the directory structure as a backup, mess around with the original source until I find a solution, then restore the original and change my overall system code to bring in my revised version.

You can't just use cp to copy a directory structure -- you'll see cp: myDir is a directory (not copied).  You'll need to add a few additional flags to copy a directory structure:

cp -Rp source source_copy

The above command copies the directory recursively while keeping the same permissions!

Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring

Recent Features

  • By
    Page Visibility API

    One event that's always been lacking within the document is a signal for when the user is looking at a given tab, or another tab. When does the user switch off our site to look at something else? When do they come back?

  • By
    CSS vs. JS Animation: Which is Faster?

    How is it possible that JavaScript-based animation has secretly always been as fast — or faster — than CSS transitions? And, how is it possible that Adobe and Google consistently release media-rich mobile sites that rival the performance of native apps? This article serves as a point-by-point...

Incredible Demos

Discussion

  1. Jeremiah Megel

    Why do you have the -s flag in there? Looking at the --help for cp, that’s the option to “make symbolic links instead of copying”, and according to Stack Overflow http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1240636 , that doesn’t even work recursively (with the -R flag). (Nor can I see why you would want to copy an entire directory recursively only for it to be populated with symlinks, especially “for the sake of backup”.) Typo?

    • Jeremiah Megel

      EDIT: David has since corrected the error in question.

  2. John Karahalis

    Another great option that I somehow always forget to use is -a (archive), used like so:

    cp -a source source_copy

    It copies structure and permissions and also preserves symlinks.

  3. demx

    Just use rsync, faster and more options. )

  4. nyxem

    Good to know. But I agree with @John

  5. Evgeniy

    I prefer to use rsync for this purpose

    rsync -rav ./source/ ./destination/

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!