Copy single file to multiple locations - What am I doing wrong
 

Hi

I have a little server running qmail/plesk . The problem is my ISP wont support Spamassassin due to load issues on the host server and I cannot afford to migrate to a root server (using VMWARE at the mo).

I have spamassassin installed manually but also need to use plesk for adding domains and I got it working. Problem is it is set up by default to rewrite_headers and accept the message. I need to reject it via the .qmail files.

I have one .qmail file and I need to copy it over every users .qmail file. Here is what I am trying.

Where * can be any domain.

However the cp command complains that /var/qmail/mailnames/*/.qmail is not a directory. I already know that and want to overwrite the file. if I omit the .qmail file and do cp ./.qmail /var/qmail/mailnames/*/ it returns a message like 'Omitting directory example.com/ ....'

What am I doing wrong. All I want to do is copy one file to multiple folders which are all level one sub-folders of a parent folder we know the path to.

By the way ln -s gives exactly the same error

Thanks in advance

The problem is that when the wildcard is expanded the command line looks like
and the error message tells you that when you have multiple sources the last entry in the command line should be a destination directory. You cannot copy a single source file to multiple destination, whereas you can copy multiple sources to one destination. You can solve this by a simple for loop:
but first check that /var/qmail/mailnames/* expands to the directories you want to copy the file into. If it happens that you have a file in /var/qmail/mailnames, it will overwritten by .qmail. In this case you can refine the criteria as in

Excellent, thanks for the quick response. Works a treat. See what you mean about refining. Nearly orverwrote my quota files.

Thanks again, this is the best tip I've had for ages. I badly need to develop my bash scripting skills, do you know of any resources?

Is there a way to get this to work with directories that have spaces in their names? This is a great solution otherwise. Whenever I try this, it copies my file into directories with no spaces just fine, but if the directory has a space in the name, i end up with a file named the first part of the directory name in the directory above it.

iirc, you need to change the Internal Field Separator (IFS) shell var. By default it's space or tab or newline, and you want to reduce it to just a newline inside the shell script.
At the top put

IFS="
"
That's a newline (rtn) with surrounding quotes. This new definition will revert to normal when the shell prog exits.
Here's a good tutorial: http://rute.2038bug.com/index.html.gz , also http://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/ & http://tldp.org/LDP/Bash-Beginners-G...tml/index.html

does this help?

1) link to Advanced Bash Scripting Guide:
http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/

2)
[lcole@harley ~]$ find ~/"space in name" -mindepth 1 -type d
/home/lcole/space in name/a
/home/lcole/space in name/b
/home/lcole/space in name/a b

thank you for the fast responses :) some new things to try, i'll keep you posted.

just to update, setting IFS worked great, thanks :)