Copying multiple types of files in one command

Question

I want to copy several files from one directory to another, with different extensions

So I would write something like:

cp -r dir1/*.gif dir2

But I also want to copy all .jpg files in the same command. Is there some sort of AND command that would work?

Answer 1

You can simply list them all:

cp dir1/*.gif dir1/*.jpg dir2

The way this works is that the shell expands out the * parameters and passes all the matching names to cp so it might actually run

cp dir1/file1.gif dir1/file2.gif dir1/file3.jpg dir1/file4.jpg dir2

Answer 2

cp /path/src/*.{gif,jpg} /path/dest 

Info about wildcards and globbing patterns.

In particular:

{ } (curly brackets)
terms are separated by commas and each term must be the name of something or a wildcard. This wildcard will copy anything that matches either wildcard(s), or exact name(s) (an “or” relationship, one or the other).

For example, this would be valid:

cp {*.doc,*.pdf} ~
This will copy anything ending with .doc or .pdf to the users home directory. Note that spaces are not allowed after the commas (or anywhere else).

Answer 3

For loops are nice for this kind of thing.

Example: Copy all .py and .ipynb files from the current directory to a directory called dst/

for file in *.py *.ipynb; do cp $file /dst/; done