Copying multiple files

You may also want to copy multiple files at once. To  demonstrate, let's begin by creating three files apple.txt, banana.txt, and carrot.txt in Elliot's home directory:

elliot@ubuntu-linux:~$ touch apple.txt banana.txt carrot.txt
elliot@ubuntu-linux:~$ ls
apple.txt carrot.txt copycats.txt dir1 
banana.txt cats.txt Desktop
elliot@ubuntu-linux:~$

To copy the three newly created files to /tmp, you can run the cp apple.txt ba- nana.txt carrot.txt /tmp command:

elliot@ubuntu-linux:~$ cp apple.txt banana.txt carrot.txt /tmp
elliot@ubuntu-linux:~$ cd /tmp
elliot@ubuntu-linux:/tmp$ ls
apple.txt banana.txt carrot.txt cats2.txt cats.txt
elliot@ubuntu-linux:/tmp$

Child’s play! In general, the cp command follows the syntax:

cp source_file(s) destination