File::Copy - Copy files or filehandles
use File::Copy;
copy("sourcefile", "destinationfile") or die "Copy failed: $!";
copy("Copy.pm", \*STDOUT);
move("/dev1/sourcefile", "/dev2/destinationfile");
use File::Copy "cp";
my $n = FileHandle->new("/a/file", "r");
cp($n, "x");The File::Copy module provides two basic functions, copy and move, which are useful for getting the contents of a file from one place to another.
The copy function takes two parameters: a file to copy from and a file to copy to. Either argument may be a string, a FileHandle reference or a FileHandle glob. Obviously, if the first argument is a filehandle of some sort, it will be read from, and if it is a file name it will be opened for reading. Likewise, the second argument will be written to. If the second argument does not exist but the parent directory does exist, then it will be created. Trying to copy a file into a non-existent directory is an error. Trying to copy a file on top of itself is also an error. copy will not overwrite read-only files.
If the destination (second argument) already exists and is a directory, and the source (first argument) is not a filehandle, then the source file will be copied into the directory specified by the destination, using the same base name as the source file. It's a failure to have a filehandle as the source when the destination is a directory.
Note that passing in files as handles instead of names may lead to loss of information on some operating systems; it is recommended that you use file names whenever possible. Files are opened in binary mode where applicable. To get a consistent behaviour when copying from a filehandle to a file, use binmode on the filehandle.
An optional third parameter can be used to specify the buffer size used for copying. This is the number of bytes from the first file, that will be held in memory at any given time, before being written to the second file. The default buffer size depends upon the file, but will generally be the whole file (up to 2MB), or 1k for filehandles that do not reference files (eg. sockets).
You may use the syntax use File::Copy "cp" to get at the cp alias for this function. The syntax is exactly the same. The behavior is nearly the same as well: as of version 2.15, cp will preserve the source file's permission bits like the shell utility cp(1) would do with default options, while copy uses the default permissions for the target file (which may depend on the process' umask, file ownership, inherited ACLs, etc.). That is, if the destination file already exists, cp will leave its permissions unchanged; otherwise the permissions are taken from the source file and modified by the umask. If an error occurs in setting permissions, cp will return 0, regardless of whether the file was successfully copied.
The move function also takes two parameters: the current name and the intended name of the file to be moved. If the destination already exists and is a directory, and the source is not a directory, then the source file will be renamed into the directory specified by the destination.
If possible, move() will simply rename the file. Otherwise, it copies the file to the new location and deletes the original. If an error occurs during this copy-and-delete process, you may be left with a (possibly partial) copy of the file under the destination name.
You may use the mv alias for this function in the same way that you may use the cp alias for copy.
File::Copy also provides the syscopy routine, which copies the file specified in the first parameter to the file specified in the second parameter, preserving OS-specific attributes and file structure. For Unix systems, this is equivalent to the simple copy routine, which doesn't preserve OS-specific attributes. For VMS systems, this calls the rmscopy routine (see below). For OS/2 systems, this calls the syscopy XSUB directly. For Win32 systems, this calls Win32::CopyFile.
Special behaviour if syscopy is defined (OS/2, VMS and Win32):
If both arguments to copy are not file handles, then copy will perform a "system copy" of the input file to a new output file, in order to preserve file attributes, indexed file structure, etc. The buffer size parameter is ignored. If either argument to copy is a handle to an opened file, then data is copied using Perl operators, and no effort is made to preserve file attributes or record structure.
The system copy routine may also be called directly under VMS and OS/2 as File::Copy::syscopy (or under VMS as File::Copy::rmscopy, which is the routine that does the actual work for syscopy).