How to force cp to overwrite directory instead of creating another one inside

Question

I m trying to write a Bash script that will overwrite an existing directory  I have a directory foo  and I am trying to overwrite bar  with it  But when I do this   cp -Rf foo  bar    a new bar foo  directory is created  I don t want that  There are two files in foo   a and b  There are files with same names in bar  as well  I want the foo a and foo b to replace bar a and bar b

User · Answer

Very similar to  Jonathan Wheeler   If you do not want to remember  but not rewrite bar   rm -r bar  cp -r foo          displays the last argument of your previous command

User · Answer

If you want to ensure bar  ends up identical to foo   use rsync instead   rsync -a --delete foo  bar    If just a few things have changed  this will execute much faster than removing and re-copying the whole directory    -a is  archive mode   which copies faithfully files in foo  to bar  --delete removes extra files not in foo  from bar  as well  ensuring bar  ends up identical If you want to see what it s doing  add -vh for verbose and human-readable Note  the slash after foo is required  otherwise rsync will copy foo  to bar foo  rather than overwriting bar  itself     Slashes after directories in rsync are confusing  if you re interested  here s the scoop  They tell rsync to refer to the contents of the directory  rather than the directory itself  So to overwrite from the contents of foo  onto the contents of bar   we use a slash on both  It s confusing because it won t work as expected with a slash on neither  though  rsync sneakily always interprets the destination path as though it has a slash  even though it honors an absence of a slash on the source path  So we need a slash on the source path to make it match the auto-added slash on the destination path  if we want to copy the contents of foo  into bar   rather than the directory foo  itself landing into bar  as bar foo      rsync is very powerful and useful  if you re curious look around for what else it can do  such as copying over ssh

User · Answer

You can do this using -T option in cp  See Man page for cp   -T  --no-target-directory     treat DEST as a normal file   So as per your example  following is the file structure     tree test test  -- bar      -- a      -- b  -- foo      -- a      -- b 2 directories  4 files   You can see the clear difference when you use -v for Verbose  When you use just -R option     cp -Rv foo  bar   foo   - gt   bar foo   foo b  - gt   bar foo b   foo a  - gt   bar foo a     tree   -- bar       -- a       -- b       -- foo           -- a           -- b   -- foo       -- a       -- b 3 directories  6 files   When you use the option -T it overwrites the contents  treating the destination like a normal file and not directory     cp -TRv foo  bar   foo b  - gt   bar b   foo a  - gt   bar a     tree  -- bar      -- a      -- b  -- foo      -- a      -- b 2 directories  4 files   This should solve your problem

User · Answer

this should solve your problem     cp -rf foo   bar

User · Answer

The operation you defined is a  merge  and you cannot do that with cp  However  if you are not looking for merging and ok to lose the folder bar then you can simply rm -rf bar to delete the folder and then mv foo bar to rename it  This will not take any time as both operations are done by file pointers  not file contents

User · Answer

The following command ensures dotfiles  hidden files  are included in the copy     cp -Rf foo   bar

User · Answer

Do it in two steps   rm -r bar  cp -r foo  bar

User · Answer

Try to use this composed of two steps command   rm -rf bar  amp  amp  cp -r foo bar

User · Answer

Use this cp command   cp -Rf foo   bar

[linux] How to force 'cp' to overwrite directory instead of creating another one inside?

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