Copying the same file to multiple directories

[Nachman Yaakov Ziskind]

.... say I wanted to copy a file, call it "welcome", to every user's home
directory. I know that all the folders live in /usr; thus /usr/first,
/usr/second, ... /usr/thousand-and-twenty-two, ...

IOW, I want to automate:

$ cd /usr
$ cp /path-to-welcome first
$ cp /path-to-welcome second
$ cp /path-to-welcome third
$ cp /path-to-welcome fourth

etc.

What's the nicest/easiest way to do this? SCO 506.

Thanks!

--
_________________________________________
Nachman Yaakov Ziskind, EA, LLM [email]awacs@egps.com[/email]
Attorney and Counselor-at-Law [url]http://yankel.com[/url]
Economic Group Pension Services [url]http://egps.com[/url]
Actuaries and Employee Benefit Consultants

[Nachman Yaakov Ziskind]

Nachman Yaakov Ziskind wrote (on Tue, Jul 01, 2003 at 04:34:13PM +0000):

> ... say I wanted to copy a file, call it "welcome", to every user's home
> directory. I know that all the folders live in /usr; thus /usr/first,
> /usr/second, ... /usr/thousand-and-twenty-two, ...
>
> IOW, I want to automate:
>
> $ cd /usr
> $ cp /path-to-welcome first
> $ cp /path-to-welcome second
> $ cp /path-to-welcome third
> $ cp /path-to-welcome fourth
>
> etc.
>
> What's the nicest/easiest way to do this? SCO 506.
>
> Thanks!

Following up my own post, I tried:

$ for F in *
do
copy /path-to-welcome $F
done

which worked somewhat, except:

a) It destroyed two (of ten or so) .docs, rendering them zero bytes.

b) It didn't copy to directories with spaces in them, giving errors:

cp: target (Enterprises) must be a directory
Usage: cp [-fip] source_file target_file
cp [-r|-R][-fip] source_file... target_file

Thanks, again.

--
_________________________________________
Nachman Yaakov Ziskind, EA, LLM [email]awacs@egps.com[/email]
Attorney and Counselor-at-Law [url]http://yankel.com[/url]
Economic Group Pension Services [url]http://egps.com[/url]
Actuaries and Employee Benefit Consultants

[Jean-Pierre Radley]

Nachman Yaakov Ziskind typed (on Tue, Jul 01, 2003 at 04:34:13PM +0000):
| ... say I wanted to copy a file, call it "welcome", to every user's home
| directory. I know that all the folders live in /usr; thus /usr/first,
| /usr/second, ... /usr/thousand-and-twenty-two, ...
|
| IOW, I want to automate:
|
| $ cd /usr
| $ cp /path-to-welcome first
| $ cp /path-to-welcome second
| $ cp /path-to-welcome third
| $ cp /path-to-welcome fourth
|
| etc.
|
| What's the nicest/easiest way to do this? SCO 506.


#!/bin/ksh
for D in `awk -F: '$3 >= 200 { print $6 }' /etc/passwd`
do
[[ -f $D/.profile || -f $D/.login ]] && cp /path-to-welcome $D
done

Slight aside: 5.0.7 does not place users in /usr by default, but in /u.
Take the trouble to move them all there now, it will make your eventual
upgrade far less annoying. The script I just wrote gives you the bare
bones for another script to both edit /etc/passwd and move the home
directories.

--
JP

[justin]

> Nachman Yaakov Ziskind wrote (on Tue, Jul 01, 2003 at 04:34:13PM +0000):

> > ... say I wanted to copy a file, call it "welcome", to every user's home
> > directory. I know that all the folders live in /usr; thus /usr/first,
> > /usr/second, ... /usr/thousand-and-twenty-two, ...
> >
> > IOW, I want to automate:
> >
> > $ cd /usr
> > $ cp /path-to-welcome first
> > $ cp /path-to-welcome second
> > $ cp /path-to-welcome third
> > $ cp /path-to-welcome fourth
> >
> > etc.
> >
> > What's the nicest/easiest way to do this? SCO 506.
> >
> > Thanks!

>
> Following up my own post, I tried:
>
> $ for F in *
> do
> copy /path-to-welcome $F
> done
>
> which worked somewhat, except:
>
> a) It destroyed two (of ten or so) .docs, rendering them zero bytes.

I am assuming that your copy overlayed some existing doc's in the parent
directory. I realize I am stating the obvious but just wanted to clarify.
Here is a script that would at least eliminate that problem.

$for F in *
do
if [ -d $F ]; then
cp /path-to-welcome "$F"
fi
done

I ran a limited test and it appeared to work. I hope this helps as this is
about the extent of my shell programming knowledge.

justin



---
Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free.
Checked by AVG anti-virus system ([url]http://www.grisoft.com[/url]).
Version: 6.0.495 / Virus Database: 294 - Release Date: 6/30/03

[John DuBois]

In article <bdsrl6$qoe$1@news.tdl.com>,
justin <justin_robbs@NO_SPAMhotmail.com> wrote:

>$for F in *
>do
> if [ -d $F ]; then
> cp /path-to-welcome "$F"
> fi
>done

Close, but to avoid problems with filenames that include whitespace, you also
need to quote $F inside of [] (note that this is not true in ksh's [[]] ).

John
--
John DuBois [email]spcecdt@armory.com[/email] KC6QKZ/AE [url]http://www.armory.com/~spcecdt/[/url]

[Nachman Yaakov Ziskind]

John DuBois wrote (on Wed, Jul 02, 2003 at 12:45:25AM +0000):

> In article <bdsrl6$qoe$1@news.tdl.com>,
> justin <justin_robbs@NO_SPAMhotmail.com> wrote:

> >$for F in *
> >do
> > if [ -d $F ]; then
> > cp /path-to-welcome "$F"
> > fi
> >done

>
> Close, but to avoid problems with filenames that include whitespace, you also
> need to quote $F inside of [] (note that this is not true in ksh's [[]] ).
>
> John

Thanks to both Justin and John for replying. I tried Justin's suggestion; it
worked on the directory names without spaces, as well as *some of* the ones
with spaces (have no clue why). Note that I was using ksh.

Then I tried replacing the first $F with sh:

if [ -d "$F" ]; then

And it worked. Woo-hoo!

Time to sacrifice a virgin by the altar of Unix.

NYZ

--
_________________________________________
Nachman Yaakov Ziskind, EA, LLM [email]awacs@egps.com[/email]
Attorney and Counselor-at-Law [url]http://yankel.com[/url]
Economic Group Pension Services [url]http://egps.com[/url]
Actuaries and Employee Benefit Consultants

[tony@aplawrence.com]

Bill Vermillion <bv@wjv.comremove> wrote:

>To my way of thinking about it the easiest way is NOT to copy
>the file to all those user files - particularly if you do
>have 1022 or more users as the folders indicate.

Exactly my immediate first thought.

>1022 files of only 20 bytes [for an exmaple] will occupy a minimum
>of 1MB - as each file takes two disk blocks.

>If these are typical welcome messages then the user never needs to
>modify them, or even has permission to do so.

>I'd opt for a link to the files - not symbolic but a hard link.

But why even do that? I'm assuming (and that may be the problem) that
some program somewhere displays the file. Why not just point that program
at one place?

--
[email]tony@aplawrence.com[/email] Unix/Linux resources: [url]http://aplawrence.com[/url]
Inexpensive phone/email support
Free SCO Skills Test: [url]http://pcunix.com/skilltests.html[/url]

[John DuBois]

In article <20030701233715.A986@egps.egps.com>,
Nachman Yaakov Ziskind <awacs@egps.com> wrote:

>John DuBois wrote (on Wed, Jul 02, 2003 at 12:45:25AM +0000):

>> Close, but to avoid problems with filenames that include whitespace, you also
>> need to quote $F inside of [] (note that this is not true in ksh's [[]] ).

>
>Thanks to both Justin and John for replying. I tried Justin's suggestion; it
>worked on the directory names without spaces, as well as *some of* the ones
>with spaces (have no clue why). Note that I was using ksh.

Sorry, I don't think I was clear: you don't need to quote variables to avoid
field splitting and globbing inside of ksh's [[ ]] operators, which are
alternatives to the [ ] that exist in both sh and sh. In ksh you can do:

if [[ -d $F ]]; then ...

while even in ksh you do need to do:

if [ -d "$F" ]; then ...

This is because [ in ksh is emulating an external program called '[', and so
field splitting and globbing must be performed as they are for all other
external programs. [[ ]] are new, explicitly built-in keywords that have new
behavior defined for them. For non-arithmetic operations, I use them in
preference to [] in ksh programs; in addition to avoiding the need for quoting
in the above cases, they allow for pattern matching, more sensible boolean
expressions, etc. For arithmetic operations, I use (()), which allow for most
C expressions and then some.

John
--
John DuBois [email]spcecdt@armory.com[/email] KC6QKZ/AE [url]http://www.armory.com/~spcecdt/[/url]