I have over 50 folder in home (using Debian 6 LAMP).

/home/xcz1/xzcx2/name1/name2
/home/zsd1/zd2/name1/name2
/home/.../.../name1/name2
...


/home/update/name2/

how can i copy the name2 from update folder and paste him into the name1 folder of each folder in the home folder?

i have tried:
cd /home/update
cp -R name2 /home/*/*/name1
and
cp -r name2 /home/../../name1
but it did not work.

Thank's

Your request (or at least the way you are explaining it) is somwhat odd, and a bit vague or ambiguous. Can you perhaps give us some more background on what you are trying to accomplish?

I'm trying to input few files in subfolders with name 'name1'.
These files are not there, so overwrite is not needed.

or as simple as possible:
It's game hosting machine, these 50 folders contain the files and folders of the game, so i want to input some files, which block exploits and etc.
how i gonna do it?

Sorry for my bad English.

If i understand you correctly, you want to copy ~/src/dir/file to ~/dst/dir/file

Could the problem be that the ~/dst/dir/ folder doesent exist?

In that case you could either just mkdir ~/dst/dir/ or do some fancy find thing.

All directories has been already created, but i need files on the right position, so i want input them to one directory named as 'dir' and input them (whole 'dir' folder) in an subdirectory where is the directory with name 'dir'.
But i don't want input it in just one directory, i want input it in all directory in the 'home' dir. (all those directories have created 'dir' directory).

for example:
/home/michael/today/dir
/home/carey/evening/dir
/home/jay/birthday/dir

and i want input 'dir' folder from
/home/update/dir
to those above.
(Please do not tell me, i have to do it one by one, it must be some trick with 'cp' command or something like that.

I don't know if there is a single command that can do that, but I think something like this shell script should work:

I tested it in a directory on my system (leaving off the leading forward slashes, for obvious reasons). I started with this directory:

(mcopy.sh is the shell script) I ran the shell script with "bash mcopy.sh". And the result was:

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You will need to use a loop.

i make script and run her on this way:

./mcopy.sh

it's work, but when finish show this error:
p: missing destination file operand after `/home/update/dir/subdirectory'
Try `cp --help' for more information.

It's not so mather, beacause it's work
Thank you.


i try your script, but it's say direcyory 'name2' doesnt exist, i put 'dir' instead of 'name2'. No errors and nothing happend.
Thank's anyway.

name2 is from your original post. I didn't enter a script to run but an example of the commands to run in the terminal.

Since you are copying into several users' home directories, you will need to run the cp command as root.

1) The first argument of cp is the file to copy. If you are copying a directory, then use the -r flag. It is to recurse through the source, not the destination. Be in the same directory as the source file, or include the path to it in the filename.

2) Wildcards are expanded before the command is run. /home/*/*/dir1 will expand to a list of directories named "dir1" two levels deep from each users home directory. Such as /home/mike/www/dir1/ for example. I think it would be better to explicitly give which directory it is, and use a variable for the user name:

Or if more than a few users:
Use the particular subdirectories you

need, and watch what you do.

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