How to let 'cp' command don't fire an error when source file does not exist?

Question

I'm using Mac OS X. I'm trying to copying some files with cp command for a build script like this.

cp ./src/*/*.h ./aaa

But this command fires an error if there is no .h file in ./src directory. How to make the command don't fire the error? (silent failure) The error makes build result fail, but I just want to copy when only there are some header file.

Answer 1

If you're talking about the error message, you can suppress that by sending it to the bit bucket:

cp ./src/*/*.h ./aaa 2>/dev/null

If you want to suppress the exit code and the error message:

cp ./src/*/*.h ./aaa 2>/dev/null || :

Answer 2

You're looking for something along the lines of

if [ -e file ]
 then cp file /somewhere
fi

(Unfortunately, the -f option is not the droid you're looking for.)

If you want to match a glob, that won't work; use find instead, e.g.:

find ./src -name \*.h -exec cp {} ./destination \;

Answer 3

Piping the result to true ensures that the command will always succeed. I have tried this on Linux but not on any Mac OS:

cp ./src/*/*.h ./aaa | true

Answer 4

Old question, but might still be relevant for others.
If you don't need to use cp, you could try with rsync.
To copy all files from a source to a destination directory, run:

rsync -avzh --ignore-errors /path/to/source /path/to/destination

Rsync comes with most Unix-like systems such as Linux, Mac OS X or FreeBSD.

Answer 5

You could force the correct error status. With a function:

$ cpalways () { cp $1 $2 2>/dev/null ; return 0 ; }

Given the following:

$ ls foo bar baz
ls: baz: No such file or directory
bar foo

Regular copy will return an error. It will return an exit status of 1.

$ cp baz bar ; echo $?
cp: baz: No such file or directory
1

If we use the cpalways() function above, any errors will be hidden:

$ cpalways baz bar ; echo $?
0
$ cpalways foo bar ; echo $?
0
$ cpalways baz bar ; echo $?
0

Answer 6

This works

$(cp ./src/*/*.h ./aaa | true)