Home / ubuntu / Questions / 930684
Accepted
P S
Asked: 2017-07-01 04:59:49 +0800 CST

How to merge two directories in Ubuntu 16.04? [duplicate]

  • 772

I have two folders /var/first/app and /var/second/app. I have different files within both folders and few are same. I want to merge /var/second/app to /var/first/app. How can I do that?

16.04

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    This should do the trick:

    rsync -av /var/second/app /var/first/app
    • 13

  2. Use something like:

    cp -r /var/first/app /var/second/
rm -r /var/first/app

    or change cp -r to cp -a to preserve ownership and timestamps.

    You can also use -i to make sure what is going on. it's going to prompt you before overwriting anything.

    • 6

  3. You may first backup your destination folder (just in case) :

    cp -r /var/first/app /var/first/app.backup

    If you don't care overwriting files :

    cp -fr /var/second/app /var/first/app

    It will copy recursively the second folder into the first one, overwriting files with same names.

    If you don't want to overwrite existing files :

    cp -nr /var/second/app /var/first/app

    If all is ok, you can remove the backup :

    rm -rf /var/first/app.backup
    • 0