Uses shell expansion to create a back-up called file.txt.bak

expand to: cp /work/host/phone/ui/main.cpp /work/target/phone/ui/main.cpp !# The entire command line typed so far.

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

Copy a file to a range of other files. Show Sample Output

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

Certain Flash video players (e.g. Youtube) write their video streams to disk in /tmp/ , but the files are unlinked. i.e. the player creates the file and then immediately deletes the filename (unlinking files in this way makes it hard to find them, and/or ensures their cleanup if the browser or plugin should crash etc.) But as long as the flash plugin's process runs, a file descriptor remains in its /proc/ hierarchy, from which we (and the player) still have access to the file. The method above worked nicely for me when I had 50 tabs open with Youtube videos and didn't want to have to re-download them all with some tool.

The --parents option will cause cp or mkdir to automatically create the parent directory structure. mkdir --parents /one/two/three/dir will create /one, /one/two, and /one/two/three as needed before creating dir. cp will copy files with their full directory structure into the target directory with this option. Thanks to Peter Leung at: http://linuxcommando.blogspot.com/2007/11/use-of-parents-flag-in-mkdir-and-c.html which has good examples of usage.

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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 "..".

less symbols, tab completion. including # export SIMPLE_BACKUP_SUFFIX="_`date +%F`" in your .bashrc provides you to easily timestamp your files

This script creates date based backups of the files. It copies the files to the same place the original ones are but with an additional extension that is the timestamp of the copy on the following format: YearMonthDay-HourMinuteSecond Show Sample Output

This is a BASH feature. The above command will create a backup of "filename" called "filename.DATE", where DATE is the actual day in %Y%m%d (year, month and day numbers together) format.

No problem with word splitting. That should works on many Unix likes. Show Sample Output

The expansion {,} in bash will repeat the given string once for each item seperated by commas. The given command will result in the following being run: cp /really/long/path/and/file/name /really/long/path/and/file/name-`date -I` These can be embedded as needed, ex: rm file{1,2,3{1,2,3}} would delete the files file1, file2, file31, file32, file32, and no other files.

Allows you to preserve your files when using cp, mv, ln, install or patch. When the target file exists, it will generate a file named XXX.~N~ (N is an auto-incremental number) instead of deleting the target file.

cp options: -p will preserve the file mode, ownership, and timestamps -r will copy files recursively also, if you want to keep symlinks in addition to the above: use the -a/--archive option

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

When working with jailed environments you need to copy all the shared libraries to your jail environment. This is done by running ldd on a binary which needs to run inside the jail. This command will use the output from ldd to automatically copy the shared libraries to a folder of your choice. Show Sample Output

Will append lines to the hosts file to do some basic ad blocking.

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)}; }