Copying contents of current directory to a subdirectory

Solution 1:

If you want to copy the contents of the folder recursively (will throw 1 error, alternatives below):

cp -r * sub/

A little more hacky, but works on non-empty subdirectories:

TARGETDIR='targetdir here';cp -r `find . -maxdepth 1 ! -name "$TARGETDIR"` "$TARGETDIR"

Another oneliner:

TARGETDIR='targetdir here';for file in *;do test "$file" != "$TARGETDIR" && cp "$file" "$TARGETDIR/";done

Or recursive:

TARGETDIR='z';for file in *;do test "$file" != "$TARGETDIR" && cp -r "$file" "$TARGETDIR/";done

Solution 2:

Supposing target is the name of the target subdirectory, if your shell is bash:

shopt -s extglob
cp -r !(target) target/

In ksh, you can directly do cp -r !(target) target/.

In zsh, you can do setopt ksh_glob then cp -r !(target) target/. Another possibility is setopt extended_glob then cp -r ^target target/.

Solution 3:

I would suggest moving the target directory outside the source directory and then put it back again; mv is free (if you are careful not to move to a different filesystem), unless you are expecting other processes to interfere/be interfered.

Most solutions posted above won't work if there are spaces in filenames. I would suggest using variants of find -print0 | xargs -0, or find -exec, etc.