Bash – Make copies of a single directory to multiple directories with different names

bashcommandcommand lineosxshell-script

I'm trying to replicate a single directory (with sub-directories) to a bunch of new directories based on a list. For example I can:

mkdir Fred Barney Thelma Louise Foo Bar

How would I copy a premade directory (with some empty sub-directories) to the same set of names? For example:

cp -r master_folder/ Fred Barney Thelma Louise Foo Bar

Any suggestions much appreciated!

Use a loop to iterate over the directories you want it copied to and copy the contents of your master directory to each one:

dest=(Fred Barney Thelma Louise Foo Bar)
for d in "${dest[@]}"; do
    cp -r master "$d"
done

Since you need to do this recursively, find is the best tool to use. To alter the name, you can use sh in the -exec call. Here is an example:

find /some/path -name 'cateory-icon' -exec sh -c 'mv "$1" "${1%/*}/category-icon-${1#cateory-icon-*}"' -- {} \;

The ${1#cateory-icon-*} expansion gets the filename after cateory-icon.

awk solution

awk '{print substr($2,1,4) substr($1,1,2)}' file

gives you the directory names.

mkdir $(awk '{print substr($2,1,4) substr($1,1,2)}' file)

creates the directories (if they are not too many). For huge numbers (10,000+) you can use:

awk '{print substr($2,1,4) substr($1,1,2)}' file | xargs --delimiter=\\n mkdir

bash solution

awk is not necessary, the shell can do that itself:

while read first last rest; do mkdir -p "${last:0:4}${first:0:2}"; done <file