UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I am trying to find out how to replace a folder that is located in every hosting account on the server I think this is possoble with a bash command of some sort?

The contents of this folder get updated from time to time and its getting to be a real pain doing it manually is there a way to do this via shell or some other method the folder in question is located inside the public_html folder of every account in the server.

Jim

Sounds like you should find a different solution, longer term. What if users have customized some parts of the folder's contents?

Do you intend to keep a backup, or just replace whatever is there? What about permissions?

There is no single bash command which will do this, but a simple script would likely suffice.

Assuming all accounts exist under /home, something like

Code:

for f in /home/*/public_html/foldername; do
  cp --backup /path/to/master/* ${f}/
  home=${f%/public_html/foldername}
  user=${home#/home/}
  chmod $user $f/*
done

Assuming you have the master copy in /path/to/master, this will copy all files from that folder to each user's public_html/foldername, creating backup files if any files would be overwritten. (Your local implementation of cp might not have the --backup option -- you want to look into that first.)

Then it uses a couple of simple substitutions to extract the user name from the path, and changes the ownership of all files in the destination folder so they belong to the user.

This is pretty brute force; perhaps you want to loop over each individual file and decide whether or not you even need to replace what's possibly already there. Then you could also preserve the user's customization if the user has removed one of these files.