Shell : Сopy one directory to multiple directories

Question

There is a directory YYY and a structure on the site:

site1.ru/wp-content/plugins/
site2.ru/wp-content/plugins/
...
site10.ru/wp-content/plugins/

Task: YYY directory to copy all directories plugins which are available on the server.

Answer 1

cp 

only can copy only to one destination , so you have to use a loop or do something like

echo dir1 dir2 dir3 | xargs -n 1 cp file1

Which will copy file1 to dir1, dir2, and dir3. xargs will call cp 3 times to do this, see the man page for xargs for details.

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

Answer 2

cp only takes one destination at a time, so call it in a loop.

for d in */wp-content/plugins/; do
  cp -Rp YYY "$d"
done

Note that this snippet will keep going if any of the cp commands fail. To abort immediately on failure, run set -e first. To keep going (makes sense on permission denied, not on disk full) but still report errors, save the return status in a variable:

ret=0
for d in */wp-content/plugins/; do
  cp -Rp YYY "$d" || ret=1
done
return $ret      # from a function; `exit $ret` in a script