How can I use the Linux terminal to copy everything in current directory to a subdirectory?
16 Answers
If you want to copy the contents of the folder recursively (will throw 1 error, alternatives below):
cp -r * sub/A little more hacky, but works on non-empty subdirectories:
TARGETDIR='targetdir here';cp -r `find . -maxdepth 1 ! -name "$TARGETDIR"` "$TARGETDIR"Another oneliner:
TARGETDIR='targetdir here';for file in *;do test "$file" != "$TARGETDIR" && cp "$file" "$TARGETDIR/";doneOr recursive:
TARGETDIR='z';for file in *;do test "$file" != "$TARGETDIR" && cp -r "$file" "$TARGETDIR/";doneSupposing target is the name of the target subdirectory, if your shell is bash:
shopt -s extglob
cp -r !(target) target/In ksh, you can directly do cp -r !(target) target/.
In zsh, you can do setopt ksh_glob then cp -r !(target) target/. Another possibility is setopt extended_glob then cp -r ^target target/.
I would suggest moving the target directory outside the source directory and then put it back again; mv is free (if you are careful not to move to a different filesystem), unless you are expecting other processes to interfere/be interfered.
Most solutions posted above won't work if there are spaces in filenames. I would suggest using variants of find -print0 | xargs -0, or find -exec, etc.
Will this work for you?
cp -r * subdir/If you meant to move instead of copying everything in the current dir to a subdirectory, you could do:
mv * subdir/This will copy everything, including dot files, and not including the target directory itself, to the target directory SUBDIR:
for i in `ls -a | grep -Ev '^(SUBDIR|\.\.?)$'`; do cp $i SUBDIR; doneThis goes in say file dirCopy.sh
for i in `ls`
do if [ $i != "subDir" ] then `cp -r $i subDir` fi
donerun it as " sh dirCopy.sh " in your console
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