copying files from one directory to another

cp won't work

Your example as it stands will not work because copy doesn't copy directory structures, it will only copy the files, hence the error message you're encountering. To do a deep copy such as this you can enlist either the tar command and use the construct tar cvf - --files-from=... | (cd /home/tmp/test/files/; tar xvf -) or you can just use rsync.

rsync

If I were you I'd use rsync to do this like so:

$ rsync -avz --files-from=abc.txt /src /home/tmp/test/files/.

If you only want the 1st 100 lines from file abc.txt you can do this:

$ rsync -avz --files-from=<(head -n 100 abc.txt) /src /home/tmp/test/files/.

Example

Sample folder data:

$ tree /home/saml/tmp/folder*
/home/saml/tmp/folder1
`-- example.tar.gz
/home/saml/tmp/folder2
`-- example.tar.gz
/home/saml/tmp/folder3
`-- example.tar.gz

Now copy the files:

$ rsync -avz --files-from=<(head -n 3 /home/saml/tmp/abc.txt) \
         /home/saml/tmp/. /home/saml/tmp/test/files/.
building file list ... done
./
folder1/
folder1/example.tar.gz
folder2/
folder2/example.tar.gz
folder3/
folder3/example.tar.gz

sent 3147093 bytes  received 81 bytes  6294348.00 bytes/sec
total size is 3145728  speedup is 1.00

Confirm they were copied:

$ tree /home/saml/tmp/test/files
/home/saml/tmp/test/files
|-- folder1
|   `-- example.tar.gz
|-- folder2
|   `-- example.tar.gz
`-- folder3
    `-- example.tar.gz

tar

If you interested here's how you do it using just tar.

$ cd /home/saml/tmp
$ tar cvf - --files-from=<(head -n 3 /home/saml/tmp/abc.txt) | (cd /home/saml/tmp/test/files/; tar xvf -)
./folder1/example.tar.gz
./folder1/example.tar.gz
./folder2/example.tar.gz
./folder2/example.tar.gz
./folder3/example.tar.gz
./folder3/example.tar.gz

Confirm that it copied:

$ tree /home/saml/tmp/test/files
/home/saml/tmp/test/files
|-- folder1
|   `-- example.tar.gz
|-- folder2
|   `-- example.tar.gz
`-- folder3
    `-- example.tar.gz