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The Java™ Tutorials
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Copying a File or Directory
Trail: Essential Java Classes
Lesson: Basic I/O
Section: File I/O (Featuring NIO.2)

Copying a File or Directory

You can copy a file or directory by using the copy(Path, Path, CopyOption...) method. The copy fails if the target file exists, unless the REPLACE_EXISTING option is specified.

Directories can be copied. However, files inside the directory are not copied, so the new directory is empty even when the original directory contains files.

When copying a symbolic link, the target of the link is copied. If you want to copy the link itself, and not the contents of the link, specify either the NOFOLLOW_LINKS or REPLACE_EXISTING option.

This method takes a varargs argument. The following StandardCopyOption and LinkOption enums are supported:

If you are not familiar with enums, see Enum Types.

The following shows how to use the copy method:

import static java.nio.file.StandardCopyOption.*;
...
Files.copy(source, target, REPLACE_EXISTING);

In addition to file copy, the Files class also defines methods that may be used to copy between a file and a stream. The copy(InputStream, Path, CopyOptions...) method may be used to copy all bytes from an input stream to a file. The copy(Path, OutputStream) method may be used to copy all bytes from a file to an output stream.

The Copy example uses the copy and Files.walkFileTree methods to support a recursive copy. See Walking the File Tree for more information.


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