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How to copy multiple files atomically from src to dest in java?

in one requirement, i need to copy multiple files from one location to another network location.
let assume that i have the following files present in the /src location.
a.pdf, b.pdf, a.doc, b.doc, a.txt and b.txt
I need to copy a.pdf, a.doc and a.txt files atomically into /dest location at once.
Currently i am using Java.nio.file.Files packages and code as follows
Path srcFile1 = Paths.get("/src/a.pdf");
Path destFile1 = Paths.get("/dest/a.pdf");
Path srcFile2 = Paths.get("/src/a.doc");
Path destFile2 = Paths.get("/dest/a.doc");
Path srcFile3 = Paths.get("/src/a.txt");
Path destFile3 = Paths.get("/dest/a.txt");
Files.copy(srcFile1, destFile1);
Files.copy(srcFile2, destFile2);
Files.copy(srcFile3, destFile3);
but this process the file are copied one after another.
As an alternate to this, in order to make whole process as atomic,
i am thinking of zipping all the files and move to /dest and unzip at the destination.
is this approach is correct to make whole copy process as atomic ? any one experience similar concept and resolved it.

is this approach is correct to make whole copy process as atomic ? any one experience similar concept and resolved it.
You can copy the files to a new temporary directory and then rename the directory.
Before renaming your temporary directory, you need to delete the destination directory
If other files are already in the destination directory that you don't want to overwrite, you can move all files from the temporary directory to the destination directory.
This is not completely atomic, however.
With removing /dest:
String tmpPath="/tmp/in/same/partition/as/source";
File tmp=new File(tmpPath);
tmp.mkdirs();
Path srcFile1 = Paths.get("/src/a.pdf");
Path destFile1 = Paths.get(tmpPath+"/dest/a.pdf");
Path srcFile2 = Paths.get("/src/a.doc");
Path destFile2 = Paths.get(tmpPath+"/dest/a.doc");
Path srcFile3 = Paths.get("/src/a.txt");
Path destFile3 = Paths.get(tmpPath+"/dest/a.txt");
Files.copy(srcFile1, destFile1);
Files.copy(srcFile2, destFile2);
Files.copy(srcFile3, destFile3);
delete(new File("/dest"));
tmp.renameTo("/dest");
void delete(File f) throws IOException {
if (f.isDirectory()) {
for (File c : f.listFiles())
delete(c);
}
if (!f.delete())
throw new FileNotFoundException("Failed to delete file: " + f);
}
With just overwriting the files:
String tmpPath="/tmp/in/same/partition/as/source";
File tmp=new File(tmpPath);
tmp.mkdirs();
Path srcFile1 = Paths.get("/src/a.pdf");
Path destFile1=paths.get("/dest/a.pdf");
Path tmp1 = Paths.get(tmpPath+"/a.pdf");
Path srcFile2 = Paths.get("/src/a.doc");
Path destFile2=Paths.get("/dest/a.doc");
Path tmp2 = Paths.get(tmpPath+"/a.doc");
Path srcFile3 = Paths.get("/src/a.txt");
Path destFile3=Paths.get("/dest/a.txt");
Path destFile3 = Paths.get(tmpPath+"/a.txt");
Files.copy(srcFile1, tmp1);
Files.copy(srcFile2, tmp2);
Files.copy(srcFile3, tmp3);
//Start of non atomic section(it can be done again if necessary)
Files.deleteIfExists(destFile1);
Files.deleteIfExists(destFile2);
Files.deleteIfExists(destFile2);
Files.move(tmp1,destFile1);
Files.move(tmp2,destFile2);
Files.move(tmp3,destFile3);
//end of non-atomic section
Even if the second method contains a non-atomic section, the copy process itself uses a temporary directory so that the files are not overwritten.
If the process aborts during moving the files, it can easily be completed.
See https://stackoverflow.com/a/4645271/10871900 as reference for moving files and https://stackoverflow.com/a/779529/10871900 for recursively deleting directories.

First there are several possibilities to copy a file or a directory. Baeldung gives a very nice insight into different possibilities. Additionally you can also use the FileCopyUtils from Spring. Unfortunately, all these methods are not atomic.
I have found an older post and adapt it a little bit. You can try using the low-level transaction management support. That means you make a transaction out of the method and define what should be done in a rollback. There is also a nice article from Baeldung.
#Autowired
private PlatformTransactionManager transactionManager;
#Transactional(rollbackOn = IOException.class)
public void copy(List<File> files) throws IOException {
TransactionDefinition transactionDefinition = new DefaultTransactionDefinition();
TransactionStatus transactionStatus = transactionManager.getTransaction(transactionDefinition);
TransactionSynchronizationManager.registerSynchronization(new TransactionSynchronization() {
#Override
public void afterCompletion(int status) {
if (status == STATUS_ROLLED_BACK) {
// try to delete created files
}
}
});
try {
// copy files
transactionManager.commit(transactionStatus);
} finally {
transactionManager.rollback(transactionStatus);
}
}
Or you can use a simple try-catch-block. If an exception is thrown you can delete the created files.

Your question lacks the goal of atomicity. Even unzipping is never atomic, the VM might crash with OutOfMemoryError right in between inflating the blocks of the second file. So there's one file complete, a second not and a third entirely missing.
The only thing I can think of is a two phase commit, like all the suggestions with a temporary destination that suddenly becomes the real target. This way you can be sure, that the second operation either never occurs or creates the final state.
Another approach would be to write a sort of cheap checksum file in the target afterwards. This would make it easy for an external process to listen for creation of such files and verify their content with the files found.
The latter would be the same like offering the container/ ZIP/ archive right away instead of piling files in a directory. Most archives have or support integrity checks.
(Operating systems and file systems also differ in behaviour if directories or folders disappear while being written. Some accept it and write all data to a recoverable buffer. Others still accept writes but don't change anything. Others fail immediately upon first write since the target block on the device is unknown.)

FOR ATOMIC WRITE:
There is no atomicity concept for standard filesystems, so you need to do only single action - that would be atomic.
Therefore, for writing more files in an atomic way, you need to create a folder with, let's say, the timestamp in its name, and copy files into this folder.
Then, you can either rename it to the final destination or create a symbolic link.
You can use anything similar to this, like file-based volumes on Linux, etc.
Remember that deleting the existing symbolic link and creating a new one will never be atomic, so you would need to handle the situation in your code and switch to the renamed/linked folder once it's available instead of removing/creating a link. However, under normal circumstances, removing and creating a new link is a really fast operation.
FOR ATOMIC READ:
Well, the problem is not in the code, but on the operation system/filesystem level.
Some time ago, I got into a very similar situation. There was a database engine running and changing several files "at once". I needed to copy the current state, but the second file was already changed before the first one was copied.
There are two different options:
Use a filesystem with support for snapshots. At some moment, you create a snapshot and then copy files from it.
You can lock the filesystem (on Linux) using fsfreeze --freeze, and unlock it later with fsfreeze --unfreeze. When the filesystem is frozen, you can read the files as usual, but no process can change them.
None of these options worked for me as I couldn't change the filesystem type, and locking the filesystem wasn't possible (it was root filesystem).
I created an empty file, mount it as a loop filesystem, and formatted it. From that moment on, I could fsfreeze just my virtual volume without touching the root filesystem.
My script first called fsfreeze --freeze /my/volume, then perform the copy action, and then called fsfreeze --unfreeze /my/volume. For the duration of the copy action, the files couldn't be changed, and so the copied files were all exactly from the same moment in time - for my purpose, it was like an atomic operation.
Btw, be sure to not fsfreeze your root filesystem :-). I did, and restart is the only solution.
DATABASE-LIKE APPROACH:
Even databases cannot rely on atomic operations, and so they first write the change to WAL (write-ahead log) and flush it to the storage. Once it's flushed, they can apply the change to the data file.
If there is any problem/crash, the database engine first loads the data file and checks whether there are some unapplied transactions in WAL and eventually apply them.
This is also called journaling, and it's used by some filesystems (ext3, ext4).

I hope this solution would be useful : as per my understanding you need to copy the files from one directory to another directory.
so my solution is as follows:
Thank You.!!
public class CopyFilesDirectoryProgram {
public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException {
// TODO Auto-generated method stub
String sourcedirectoryName="//mention your source path";
String targetdirectoryName="//mention your destination path";
File sdir=new File(sourcedirectoryName);
File tdir=new File(targetdirectoryName);
//call the method for execution
abc (sdir,tdir);
}
private static void abc(File sdir, File tdir) throws IOException {
if(sdir.isDirectory()) {
copyFilesfromDirectory(sdir,tdir);
}
else
{
Files.copy(sdir.toPath(), tdir.toPath());
}
}
private static void copyFilesfromDirectory(File source, File target) throws IOException {
if(!target.exists()) {
target.mkdir();
}else {
for(String items:source.list()) {
abc(new File(source,items),new File(target,items));
}
}
}
}

Java and file list

I should get a list of file contained in a directory.
What I do is:
File file = new File(PATH);
for (File index:file.listFiles)
System.out.println(index.toString());
The matter is that doing this I get printed also files I shouldn't see, temporary, for example.
In my test directory I have to file: ciao and test, but when I run my code I see ciao, ciao~, test~, and also other stuff if I modify a file (I suppose they are buffer file).
So, how can I get only true file, as if I was browsing my fileSystem?

If you want to list only files whose attributes (name included) obey a set of conditions, you need to use another version of .listFiles() which takes a FileFilter as an argument. This interface has a sole accept() method which returns true if the file can be listed.
This simple example will filter out files whose name end with a ~:
file.listFiles(new FileFilter() {
#Override
public boolean accept(File pathname) {
return !pathname.getName().endsWith("~");
}
})
If your FileFilter is more complex than the one above, consider exernalizing it to a variable (private static final if the filter will never change).

Files you don't see are probably hidden, you can check that:
File file = ...;
if(file.isHidden()){...}

use
if (!index.isHidden()) {
System.out.println(index.toString());
}
to suppress hidden files.
you further can check for
index.isDirectory()
if you dont want subdirectory to be listed.
But dont expect an method that can read your thougts what you call an real (or clean, or nice) file.
You could write yourself a filter for that, once you now what files to exclude.
See java.io.FileFilter for more.

Java fails in moving (renaming) a file when the resulting file is on another filesystem

A program we have erred when trying to move files from one directory to another. After much debugging I located the error by writing a small utility program that just moves a file from one directory to another (code below). It turns out that while moving files around on the local filesystem works fine, trying to move a file to another filesystem fails.
Why is this? The question might be platform specific - we are running Linux on ext3, if that matters.
And the second question; should I have been using something else than the renameTo() method of the File class? It seems as if this just works on local filesystems.
Tests (run as root):
touch /tmp/test/afile
java FileMover /tmp/test/afile /root/
The file move was successful
touch /tmp/test/afile
java FileMover /tmp/test/afile /some_other_disk/
The file move was erroneous
Code:
import java.io.File;
public class FileMover {
public static void main(String arguments[] ) throws Exception {
boolean success;
File file = new File(arguments[0]);
File destinationDir = new File(arguments[1]);
File destinationFile = new File(destinationDir,file.getName() );
success = file.renameTo(destinationFile);
System.out.println("The file move was " + (success?"successful":"erroneous"));
}
}

Java 7 and above
Use Files.move(Path source, Path target, CopyOption... opts).
Note that you must not provide the ATOMIC_MOVE option when moving files between file systems.
Java 6 and below
From the docs of File.renameTo:
[...] The rename operation might not be able to move a file from one filesystem to another [...]
The obvious workaround would be to copy the file "manually" by opening a new file, write the content to the file, and delete the old file.
You could also try the FileUtils.moveFile method from Apache Commons.

Javadoc to the rescue:
Many aspects of the behavior of this method are inherently
platform-dependent: The rename operation might not be able to move a
file from one filesystem to another, it might not be atomic, and it
might not succeed if a file with the destination abstract pathname
already exists. The return value should always be checked to make sure
that the rename operation was successful.
Note that the Files class defines the move method to move or rename a
file in a platform independent manner.

From the docs:
Renames the file denoted by this abstract pathname.
Many aspects of the behavior of this method are inherently
platform-dependent: The rename operation might not be able to move a
file from one filesystem to another, it might not be atomic, and it
might not succeed if a file with the destination abstract pathname
already exists. The return value should always be checked to make sure
that the rename operation was successful.
If you want to move file between different file system you can use Apache's moveFile

your ider is error
beause /some_other_disk/ is relative url but completely url ,can not find the url
i have example
java FileMover D:\Eclipse33_workspace_j2ee\test\src\a\a.txt D:\Eclipse33_workspace_j2ee\test\src
The file move was successful
java FileMover D:\Eclipse33_workspace_j2ee\test\src\a\a.txt \Eclipse33_workspace_j2ee\test\src
The file move was erronous
result is url is error

Why File.renameTo doesn't change where File points to?

File oldFile = new File("old");
if (oldFile.renameTo(new File("new"))){
System.out.println(oldFile.getName());//this prints "old"
}
I've looked at openJDK source, and there renameTo(File dest) function looks like this:
public class File implements Serializable, Comparable<File> {
static private FileSystem fs = FileSystem.getFileSystem();
private String path;
...
public boolean renameTo(File dest) {
SecurityManager security = System.getSecurityManager();
if (security != null) {
security.checkWrite(path);
security.checkWrite(dest.path);
}
return fs.rename(this, dest);
}
...
}
So the path variable never gets changed. Why is that so? What would be the right way to use renamed File variable? Currently i do it like this:
File oldFile = new File("/home/blin/misk/old");
File newFile = new File("/home/blin/misk/new");
if (oldFile.renameTo(newFile)){
oldFile=newFile;
System.out.println(oldFile.getName());//this prints "new"
}

The simplest possible explanation is that, to quote the Javadoc:
Instances of the File class are immutable; that is, once created, the abstract pathname represented by a File object will never change.
As others have said, there is no right or wrong here. However, as soon as the library's designers made the above choice, the current behaviour of renameTo became the only possible one.
As to your second code snippet, I can see no flaws in it.

A File object is just a name, it does not even have to exist.
The renameTo API call actually renames the file on the file system, but does not alter the File Object because this is what the API is designed to do. there is no right or wrong here. the API designers at Sun thought that it makes more sense this way.

From quick glance into File, it looks like its immutable. It has some setters, but they operate on actual file on filesystem, not on the File instance.
So rename not modifiing current instance keeps the same style.

How to convert a Hadoop Path object into a Java File object

Is there a way to change a valid and existing Hadoop Path object into a useful Java File object. Is there a nice way of doing this or do I need to bludgeon to code into submission? The more obvious approaches don't work, and it seems like it would be a common bit of code
void func(Path p) {
if (p.isAbsolute()) {
File f = new File(p.toURI());
}
}
This doesn't work because Path::toURI() returns the "hdfs" identifier and Java's File(URI uri) constructor only recognizes the "file" identifier.
Is there a way to get Path and File to work together?
**
Ok, how about a specific limited example.
Path[] paths = DistributedCache.getLocalCacheFiles(job);
DistributedCache is supposed to provide a localized copy of a file, but it returns a Path. I assume that DistributedCache make a local copy of the file, where they are on the same disk. Given this limited example, where hdfs is hopefully not in the equation, is there a way for me to reliably convert a Path into a File?
**

I recently had this same question, and there really is a way to get a file from a path, but it requires downloading the file temporarily. Obviously, this won't be suitable for many tasks, but if time and space aren't essential for you, and you just need something to work using files from Hadoop, do something like the following:
import java.io.File;
import java.io.IOException;
import org.apache.hadoop.conf.Configuration;
import org.apache.hadoop.fs.FileSystem;
import org.apache.hadoop.fs.Path;
public final class PathToFileConverter {
public static File makeFileFromPath(Path some_path, Configuration conf) throws IOException {
FileSystem fs = FileSystem.get(some_path.toUri(), conf);
File temp_data_file = File.createTempFile(some_path.getName(), "");
temp_data_file.deleteOnExit();
fs.copyToLocalFile(some_path, new Path(temp_data_file.getAbsolutePath()));
return temp_data_file;
}
}

If you get a LocalFileSystem
final LocalFileSystem localFileSystem = FileSystem.getLocal(configuration);
You can pass your hadoop Path object to localFileSystem.pathToFile
final File localFile = localFileSystem.pathToFile(<your hadoop Path>);

Not that I'm aware of.
To my understanding, a Path in Hadoop represents an identifier for a node in their distributed filesystem. This is a different abstraction from a java.io.File, which represents a node on the local filesystem. It's unlikely that a Path could even have a File representation that would behave equivalently, because the underlying models are fundamentally different.
Hence the lack of translation. I presume by your assertion that File objects are "[more] useful", you want an object of this class in order to use existing library methods? For the reasons above, this isn't going to work very well. If it's your own library, you could rewrite it to work cleanly with Hadoop Paths and then convert any Files into Path objects (this direction works as Paths are a strict superset of Files). If it's a third party library then you're out of luck; the authors of that method didn't take into account the effects of a distributed filesystem and only wrote that method to work on plain old local files.