Question

I want to copy text files and only text files from src/ to dst/

 groovy:000> 'cp src/*.txt dst/'.execute().text        ===>  groovy:000>  

You can see the command executes w/out error but the file src/test.txt does not get copied to dst/

This also fails:

 groovy:000> 'cp src/* dst/'.execute().text        ===>  groovy:000>  

However…

 'cp src/this.txt dst/'.execute().text 

works

Also,

 'cp -R src/ dst'.execute().text 

works

Why dose the wild card seem to cause my command to silently fail?

Answer 1

Wildcard expansion is performed by the shell, not by cp (or groovy). Your first example is trying to copy a file named *. You could make your command ‘sh -c ‘cp …”