Remember to backup everything before changing it so you can restore all to normal.

Utilizes shell expansion of {} to give the original filename and a new filename as arguments to `cp`. Can easily be extended to make multiple copies. Show Sample Output

If any changes have been made to the package while it was unpacked (ie, conffiles files in /etc modi‐fied), the new package will inherit the changes. This way you can make it easy to copy packages from one computer to another, or to recreate packages that are installed on your system, but no longer available elsewhere. Note: dpkg-repack will place the created package in the current directory. Show Sample Output

I used this to copy all PDFs recursively to a selected dir

You could do the following, however, brace expansion with {} is not defined in POSIX, and therefore not guaranteed to work in all shells. But, if it does, it's more convenient (although it's certainly not less typing): cp -r {*,.??*} /dest Sometimes there are times when I need to cp(1), mv(1) or rm(1) files recursively, but don't want to traverse the previous directory by following ../../../../ etc out of the current directory. This command prevents that. The secret sauce is ".??*". The file globbing ensures that it must start with a dot, and be followed by at least two characters. So, three characters must exist in the filename, which eliminates "." and "..".

Useful if you have a list of images called 1 2 3 4 and so on, you can adapt it to rewrite it as 4 (in this example) 0-padded number. Show Sample Output

Sometimes in a hurry you may move or copy a file using an already existent file name. If you aliased the cp and mv command with the -i option you are prompted for a confirmation before overwriting but if your aliases aren't there you will loose the target file! The -b option will force the mv command to check if the destination file already exists and if it is already there a backup copy with an ending ~ is created.

Use if you have pictures all over the place and you want to copy them to a central location Synopsis: Find jpg files translate all file names to lowercase backup existing, don't overwrite, preserve mode ownership and timestamps copy to a central location

This causes cp to detect and omit large blocks of nulls. Sparse files are useful for implying a lot of disk space without actually having to write it all out. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparse_file You can use it in a pipe too: dd if=/dev/zero bs=1M count=5 |cp --sparse=always /dev/stdin SPARSE_FILE Show Sample Output

Prior to working on/modifying a file, use the 'install -m' command which can both copy files, create directories, and set their permissions at the same time. Useful when you are working in the public_html folder and need to keep the cp'd file hidden. Show Sample Output

Preserve file structure when coping and exclude some file o dir patterns Show Sample Output

1. you don't need to prepend the year with 20 - just use Y instead of y 2. you may want to make your function a bit more secure: buf () { cp ${1?filename not specified}{,$(date +%Y%m%d_%H%M%S)}; }

Most distributions alias cp to 'cp -i', which means when you attempt to copy into a directory that already contains the file, cp will prompt to overwrite. A great default to have, but when you mean to overwrite thousands of files, you don't want to sit there hitting [y] then [enter] thousands of times. Enter the backslash. It runs the command unaliased, so as in the example, cp will happily overwrite existing files much in the way mv works. Show Sample Output

Backup a whole directory copying only updated files.

Appends the input file with the date format YYYY-MM-DD.bak. Also runs silently if you remove the -v on the cp at the end of the function.

"infix" version in bash (4.x+) Remove -v to make it silent. BTW: The OP forgot to use "cat" and "nmap" ;-) I had a good laugh though. Show Sample Output

even shorter (infix) version. Show Sample Output

icp and imv, interactive versions of cp and mv, will prompt the user for the new filename. These tools are from rename-utils package.

helpful when you see something like this: zsh: argument list too long: cp

Take a folder full of files and split it into smaller folders containing a maximum number of files. In this case, 100 files per directory. find creates the list of files xargs breaks up the list into groups of 100 for each group, create a directory and copy in the files Note: This command won't work if there is whitespace in the filenames (but then again, neither do the alternative commands :-)

As cp is often an alias to cp -i you can use \cp (or cp full path /bin/cp) to use the real cp command instead of its alias