If you’re uncertain about the source and destination contents, you can always compare the two with the comm command or the diff command before proceeding with the ditto command. To better understand the ditto command, let’s run through a few examples with real syntax.Īt it’s most simple form, ditto works much like the cp command, with basic syntax as follows:įor example, if you wanted to copy ~/Desktop/FluffyBackups to /Volumes/FluffyBackups/ you would just type the following:ĭitto ~/Desktop/FluffyBackups /Volumes/FluffyBackups/Īgain, this will retain all ownership and resource metadata details of the files copied, which may be particularly important if you’re copying files from one user directory to another, or if you want to preserve something like modification times of files. Finally, ditto also follows symbolic links, making it particularly handy if you’re a heavy user of the ln command. Also, if the destination folder does exist, the copied contents will be merged together in that destination directory. Additionally, ditto can be used to copy a file or folder to a source directory, but if that source doesn’t yet exist, ditto will automatically create it.

Ditto software windows