Recursively add a file to all sub-directories

Question

How do I recursively add(or touch) a file into the current directory, as well as all sub-directories?

For example,
I would like to turn this directory tree:

.
├── 1
│   ├── A
│   └── B
├── 2
│   └── A
└── 3
    ├── A
    └── B
        └── I   
9 directories, 0 files

into

.
├── 1
│   ├── A
│   │   └── file
│   ├── B
│   │   └── file
│   └── file
├── 2
│   ├── A
│   │   └── file
│   └── file
├── 3
│   ├── A
│   │   └── file
│   ├── B
│   │   ├── file
│   │   └── I
│   │       └── file
│   └── file
└── file

9 directories, 10 files

Answer 1

How about:

find . -type d -exec cp file {} \;

From man find:

   -type c
          File is of type c:
           d      directory

   -exec command ;
          Execute  command;  All following arguments to find are taken 
          to be arguments to the command until an  argument  consisting 
          of `;' is encountered.  The string `{}' is replaced by the 
          current file

So, the command above will find all directories and run cp file DIR_NAME/ on each of them.

Answer 2

If you just want to create an empty file, you can use touch and a shell glob. In zsh:

touch **/*(/e:REPLY+=/file:)

In bash:

shopt -s globstar
for d in **/*/; do touch -- "$d/file"; done

Portably, you can use find:

find . -type d -exec sh -c 'for d; do touch "$d/file"; done' _ {} +

Some find implementations, but not all, let you write find . -type d -exec touch {}/file \;

If you want to copy some reference content, then you'll have to call find in a loop. In zsh:

for d in **/*(/); do cp -p reference_file "$d/file"; done

In bash:

shopt -s globstar
for d in **/*/; do cp -p reference_file "$d/file"; done

Portably:

find . -type d -exec sh -c 'for d; do cp -p reference_file "$d/file"; done' _ {} +

Answer 3

When wanting to touch files called $name in the current directory and in all subdirectories, this will work:

find . -type d -exec touch {}/"${name}"  \;

Note that the comment by ChuckCottrill to the answer by terdon does NOT work, as it will only touch the file called $name in the current directory and the directory itself.

It will not create files in subdirectories as requested by the OP, while this version here will.

Answer 4

To actually just create a file, you can use touch with find:

$ find . -type d -exec touch {}/file \;

Answer 5

Another example that I was just testing given your's is to create consecutive files in specific sub directory like I have it here.

├── FOLDER
│   ├── FOLDER1
│   └── FOLDER2
├── FOLDER
│   ├── FOLDER1
│   └── FOLDER2
└── FOLDER
    ├── FOLDER1
    └── FOLDER2

I used this command below to create in only the FOLDER2 dir files with consecutive number sequence like file{1..10}

for d in **/FOLDER2/; do touch $d/file{1..10}.doc; done