Copy command with piping

English Programming/Scripting
1

Is there a copy command that allows piping from a text file? Something like…

cat filelist.txt | copycommand --recursive destination_directory

Thanks.

2

Might want to explain what you actually want to do because I struggle to comprehend that. It sounds like you want to cat a file then copy recursively which makes no sense. Just copy recursively.

I suspect what your trying to achieve is more than possible and probably wants redirection over a pipe, but as said can’t give an exact as I’m really unsure what you’re actually trying to achieve. It maybe that tee is better for the job.

3

I want to prepare a list of files and or directories in a file called filelist.txt to be copied to a specific existing directory to be named on the command line. “cat filelist.txt |” would pipe these as parameters to a copy utility. The filenames might exist in different directories or filesystems and will have no discernable patterns.

Thanks for your help.

4

rsync may be the easiest otherwise I suspect a rather convoluted function using a read could be done.

rsync --files-from= which will take the file or - to use stdin. Check the man page for the exact syntax.

5 

for i in $(cat filelist.txt); do
    cp -f "$i" "/new/path/$i"
done

Something like this?

6

Thank you very much people. The second solution looks quite elegant, but I will try both.

7

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  • From the man page:

SYNOPSIS
cp [OPTION]… -T] SOURCE DEST
cp [OPTION]… SOURCE… DIRECTORY
cp [OPTION]… -t DIRECTORY SOURCE…

So…

cp -t /path/to/destination cat filelist.txt | xargs

I have not tested this yet, but it looks good to me.

Good luck.

ionmich wrote:
> Thank you very much people. The second solution looks quite elegant, but
> I will try both.
>
>
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