10. cp (Copy)

Lesson Content

Let’s start making some copies of these files. Much like copy and pasting files in other operating systems, the shell gives us an even simpler way of doing that.

$ cp mycoolfile /home/pete/Documents/cooldocs

mycoolfile is the file you want to copy and /home/pete/Documents/cooldocs is where you are copying the file to.

You can copy multiple files and directories as well as use wildcards. A wildcard is a character that can be substituted for a pattern based selection, giving you more flexibility with searches. You can use wildcards in every command for more flexibility.

• * the wildcard of wildcards, it’s used to represent all single characters or any string.
• ? used to represent one character
• [] used to represent any character within the brackets

$ cp *.jpg /home/pete/Pictures

This will copy all files with the .jpg extension in your current directory to the Pictures directory.

A useful command is to use the -r flag, this will recursively copy the files and directories within a directory.

Try to do a cp on a directory that contains a couple of files to your Documents directory. Didn’t work did it? Well that’s because you’ll need to copy over the files and directories inside as well with -r command.

$ cp -r Pumpkin/ /home/pete/Documents

One thing to note, if you copy a file over to a directory that has the same filename, the file will be overwritten with whatever you are copying over. This is no bueno if you have a file that you don’t want to get accidentally overwritten. You can use the -i flag (interactive) to prompt you before overwriting a file.

$ cp -i mycoolfile /home/pete/Pictures

Exercise

Copy over a couple of files, be careful not to overwrite anything important.

Quiz Question