TL;DR: copy file $SOURCE to directories $TARGET given path $ROOT:

find $ROOT -type d -name $TARGET -exec cp $SOURCE {} \;

Problem

Given the following directory structure:

tree
.
├── dir1
├── dir2
├── dir3
└── file

3 directories, 1 file

How can we copy file to dir1/, dir2/, and dir3/ to get something like the following?

tree
.
├── dir1
│   └── file
├── dir2
│   └── file
├── dir3
│   └── file
└── file

3 directories, 4 files

Solution

cp

We can explicitly call cp to copy the source file to each target directory:

cp file dir1; cp file dir2; cp file dir3

But this doesn’t feel DRY—especially when the number of directories increases.

find

With find, we can list all the directories:

find . -type d

.
./dir2
./dir3
./dir1

To match the directory name starting with dir:

find . -type d -name 'dir*'

./dir2
./dir3
./dir1

Then we can execute cp and pass each directory as {}:

find . -type d -name 'dir*' -exec cp file {} \;