How to copy file to another folder in php

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The copy[] function in PHP is used to copy a file from source to target or destination directory. It makes a copy of the source file to the destination file and if the destination file already exists, it gets overwritten. The copy[] function returns true on success and false on failure.

Syntax:

bool copy[ string $source, string $destination, resource $context ]

Parameters: This function uses three parameters source, destination and context which are listed below:

• $source: It specifies the path of the source file.
• $destination: It specifies the path of the destination file or folder.
• $context: It specifies the context resource created with stream_context_create[] function. It is optional parameter.

Return: It returns a boolean value, either true [on success] or false [on failure].

Examples:

Input : $source = 'Source_file_location'
        $destination = 'Destination_file_location'
        copy[ $source, $destination ]

Output: true

See Also

• move_uploaded_file[] - Moves an uploaded file to a new location
• rename[] - Renames a file or directory
• The section of the manual about handling file uploads

simonr_at_orangutan_dot_co_dot_uk ¶

18 years ago

Having spent hours tacking down a copy[] error: Permission denied , [and duly worrying about chmod on winXP] , its worth pointing out that the 'destination' needs to contain the actual file name ! --- NOT just the path to the folder you wish to copy into.......
DOH !
hope this saves somebody hours of fruitless debugging

cooper at asu dot ntu-kpi dot kiev dot ua ¶

16 years ago

It take me a long time to find out what the problem is when i've got an error on copy[]. It DOESN'T create any directories. It only copies to existing path. So create directories before. Hope i'll help,

steve a h ¶

14 years ago

Don't forget; you can use copy on remote files, rather than doing messy fopen stuff.  e.g.

promaty at gmail dot com ¶

11 years ago

Here is a simple script that I use for removing and copying non-empty directories. Very useful when you are not sure what is the type of a file.

I am using these for managing folders and zip archives for my website plugins.



Cheers!

absorbentshoulderman at gmail dot com ¶

9 years ago

A nice simple trick if you need to make sure the folder exists first:



That simple.

ASchmidt at Anamera dot net ¶

8 years ago

Below a code snippet for downloading a file from a web server to a local file.

It demonstrates useful customizations of the request [such as setting a User-Agent and Referrer, often required by web sites], and how to download only files if the copy on the web site is newer than the local copy.

It further demonstrates the processing of response headers [if set by server] to determine the timestamp and file name. The file type is checked because some servers return a 200 OK return code with a textual "not found" page, instead of a proper 404 return code.

kadnan at yahoo dot com ¶

18 years ago

you can also try xcopy command by using Shell to move/copy files/folders from one place to another
here is the code:



by executing this command, it will move folder along with all contents to destination.

-adnan

allasso residing at signalmesa dot com ¶

13 years ago

As far as recursive copy, something like this seems to work fine for me:



Of course you need to get all your permissions clear.  You can do the necessary stuff to use variables.

You could also do this to create the destination directory:



This will create a new directory called "dir_dest" if it does not already exist. This is a bit risky though if your situation is ambiguous, and you want to continue to make backups etc, 'cause if you do it twice you end up with:

dir_destination/dir_source

to avoid that one could do something like:



Maybe someone can tell me when or why it would be better to use all that PHP code I see here.

Vinicio Coletti ¶

6 years ago

Copying large files under Windows 8.1, from one NTFS filesystem to another NTFS filesystem, results in only the first 4 GiB copied and the rest of the file is ignored.

So, if you think to have files larger than 4 GiB, instead of doing:
   copy[$source,$destination];
it is much better to do something like:
   exec["xcopy $source $destination"];

I will check to see if this issue is valid also under Linux.
It depends on PHP not being compiled in 64 bit mode?

someone at terrasim dot com ¶

11 months ago

On Windows, php-7.4.19-Win32-vc15-x64 - copy[] corrupted a 6GB zip file. Our only recourse was to write:

function file_win_copy[ $src, $dst ] {
shell_exec[ 'COPY "'.$src.'" "'.$dst.'"'];
return file_exists[$dest];
}

jtaylor -at- ashevillenc -dot- com ¶

15 years ago

It seems as though you can only use move_uploaded_file[] once on a temporary file that has been uploaded through a form. Most likely the action this function takes destroys the temporary file after it has been moved, assuming permanent placement on a file system.

Attempting to use the function again in the same PHP script will return false and not move the file.

I ran into this when an image that was uploaded did not need resizing [smaller than a size threshold] and after moving the temporary upload to the "originals" directory, an attempt was made to again move the temporary file to another folder.

This behavior is understandable, but be careful - in this instance, I simply used copy[] on the file that was already uploaded.

nensa at zeec dot biz ¶

13 years ago

When I recently had to copy a few millions of small files [< 1kb] from one NAS to another and for some reasons had to do that file by file I compared the following function with copy[$src, $dest] and shell_exec["cp -r $src $dest"].

Surprisingly stream_copy seamed to be slightly faster [at least in this specific context].

Bas Vijfwinkel ¶

7 years ago

Paths and filenames with Japanese characters are not handled correctly if you are running Apache/PHP on a Windows machine.
With the following code you can convert e.g. the network path to the appropriate encoding so that Windows understands where to look:



There are however a number of characters that cannot be converted correctly like '②' and '﨑' because there are no SJIS equivalents.

cory at veck dot ca ¶

11 years ago

My own 'cp -R' written in PHP.

Hopefully it will work for your situation. I'm using it in a web based file manager for my CMS.

mishawagon at gmail dot com ¶

3 years ago

Copy failed for me until I added dirname[__FILE__] to the file paths.
copy[dirname[__FILE__].$tempdata,dirname[__FILE__].$filepath]

mspreij ¶

15 years ago

This function creates a new filename to use for a copy of the given filename, its behaviour was mostly sto^Wborrowed from how the OS X Finder [*1] does it.
Note it *doesn't* actually copy the file, it just returns the new name. I needed it to work regardless of data source [filesystem, ftp, etc].

It also tries to match the current name as neatly as possible:
foo.txt -> foo copy.txt -> foo copy 1.txt -> foo copy 2.txt [etc]
foo.bar.baz.jpg -> foo.bar.baz copy.jpg
foobar -> foobar copy -> foobar copy 1 [etc]
".txt" -> .txt copy, and "txt." -> txt. copy
file.longextension -> file.longextension copy

It keeps trying until it finds a name that is not yet taken in $list, or until it looped 500 times [change as needed].

If the renamed file becomes longer than max filename length, it starts chopping away at the end of the part before where it adds " copy": reallylong...filename.txt -> reallylong...filena copy.txt