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I would like to copy the whole /usr/share/zoneinfo/ directory into /var/www/clients/client1/web5/./usr/share/zoneinfo/. (The /./ is added for clarity and formatting purposes)
The directory /var/www/clients/client1/web5/ exists, but the underlying usr/share/zoneinfo directory doesn't.
Is there a way to do this with a single command or do I have to call mkdir -p first ?
I thought cp --parents would do just that, but it seems it only works when copying a single file, not a whole directory.
Because you are specifying a destination location of /var/www/clients/client1/web5/./usr/share/zoneinfo/, cp will first look to make sure that directory exists to write files into. So yes, you will need to create the directory first. However, if /var/www/clients/client1/web5/./usr/share/ is already present, you should be able to:
cp -pr /usr/share/zoneinfo /var/www/clients/client1/web5/./usr/share/zoneinfo
as the destination directory exists to write the zoneinfo directory into.
rsync -a --relative did the trick.
rsync -a --relative /usr/share/zoneinfo/ /var/www/clients/client1/web5/
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