Duplicate file x times in command shell
Your shell code has two issues:
- The
echo
should not be there. - The variable
$i
is mistyped as$1
in the destination file name.
To make a copy of a file in the same directory as the file itself, use
cp thefile thecopy
If you insert anything else in there, e.g.
cp thefile theotherthing thecopy
then it is assumed that you'd like to copy thefile
and theotherthing
into the directory called thecopy
.
In your case, it specifically looks for a file called test.ogg
and one named echo
to copy to the directory test$1.ogg
.
The $1
will most likely expand to an empty string. This is why, when you delete the echo
from the command, you get "test.ogg and test.ogg are the same files"; the command being executed is essentially
cp test.ogg test.ogg
This is probably a mistyping.
In the end, you want something like this:
for i in {1..100}; do cp test.ogg "test$i.ogg"; done
Or, as an alternative
i=0
while (( i++ < 100 )); do
cp test.ogg "test$i.ogg"
done
Or, using tee
:
tee test{1..100}.ogg <test.ogg >/dev/null
Note: This would most likely work for 100 copies, but for thousands of copies it may generate a "argument list too long" error. In that case, revert to using a loop.
for i in {1..100}; do cp test.ogg "test_$i.ogg" ; done
Short and precise
< test.ogg tee test{1..100}.ogg
or even better do
tee test{1..100}.ogg < test.ogg >/dev/null
see tee command usage for more help.
Update
as suggested by @Gilles, using tee
has the defect of not preserving any file metadata. To overcome that issue, you might have to run below command after that:
cp --attributes-only --preserve Source Target