Copying files to multiple USB flash drives

Question

Does anyone know of any software or hardware (or both) that will copy a certain set of files to multiple USB flash drives?

We have a project where there are some PDF's that need to be copied to about 200 USB flash drives and I am not sure what the fastest way to that would be.

I work on a Mac OSX, but I do have access to a Windows machine as well.

Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Answer 1

Under Linux (e.g., Mac OS X), this is pretty easy with a shell script.

Assuming that your USB drives (and only your USB drives) are mounted in /media, you can use a simple for loop:

for device in /media/*; do
    // copy instructions here
    // e.g., cp file "$device"
done

If you have 10 USB slots, this will allow you to process 10 drives at once.

The above for loop will copy the files sequentially, i.e., it will process the first flash drive, then start with the second one. If you have to copy a large amount of data, you can also copy the files in parallel:

unset PIDS

for device in /media/*; do
    // a single copy instruction here
    // e.g., cp file1 file2 file 3 "$device" &
done

wait

The ampersand after the copy instruction makes it execute in the background, i.e., the rest of the for loop is executed immediately. The command wait delays the script until all background processes have finished.