Copy a directory structure to ennumerated folders

Question

My folder structure is like this:

ej-1/index.html
ej-1/js/scripts.js
ej-2/index.html
ej-2/js/scripts.js
...
ej-12/index.html
ej-12/js/scripts.js

Sometimes I need to re-structure the other ennumerated folders with a new default set of files and folders. For that end, I'm trying to copy the ideal folder base structure to the others, using the following:

cp -r ej-1/* ej-{2..12}/*

My expectation was:

ej-1/* -> ej-2/*
ej-1/* -> ej-3/*
...
ej-1/* -> ej-12/*

Instead, it copies the content of each folder to the last one, making some overwritting nonsense:

ej-1/* -> ej-12/*
ej-2/* -> ej-12/*
ej-3/* -> ej-12/*
...

What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

Have a look at the cp manual, with man cp. The relevant parts are as follows.

SYNOPSIS
       cp [OPTION]... SOURCE... DIRECTORY
DESCRIPTION
       Copy SOURCE to DEST, or multiple SOURCE(s) to DIRECTORY.

By specifying multiple arguments, this is the format you are using. This copies multiple SOURCEs to a single DIRECTORY, which is not what you want. Instead, if you want to copy a single SOURCE to multiple directories, you could use something like a for loop, e.g.

for i in {2..12}; do cp -r ej-1/* ej-$i; done

N.B. This is untested. I've also removed the * globs from the destination, as they were unnecessary (from my interpretation of your question), and results in a single DIRECTORY for the cp command.