How to copy a file to multiple directories using the gnu cp command

Question

Is it possible to copy a single file to multiple directories using the cp command ?

I tried the following , which did not work:

cp file1 /foo/ /bar         


        

Answer 1

Not using cp per se, but...

This came up for me in the context of copying lots of Gopro footage off of a (slow) SD card to three (slow) USB drives. I wanted to read the data only once, because it took forever. And I wanted it recursive.

$ tar cf - src | tee >( cd dest1 ; tar xf - ) >( cd dest2 ; tar xf - ) | ( cd dest3 ; tar xf - )

(And you can add more of those >() sections if you want more outputs.)

I haven't benchmarked that, but it's definitely a lot faster than cp-in-a-loop (or a bunch of parallel cp invocations).