copyfilerange(1) — Linux manual page

COPYFILERANGE(1)              User Commands              COPYFILERANGE(1)

NAME         top

       copyfilerange - copy range(s) from source to destination file

SYNOPSIS         top

       copyfilerange [options] source destination range...

DESCRIPTION         top

       The copyfilerange command copies byte ranges from source to
       destination file. It is a wrapper around the copy_file_range(2)
       system call.

       The command can be used to create files with unallocated gaps
       (sparse files) and/or with shared blocks between multiple files
       (reflinks).

       Each range is of the form source_offset:destination_offset:length,
       with all values in bytes. If length is 0, then as much data as is
       available is copied. Multiple ranges may be supplied.

       When one or both of the offsets are omitted, the operation uses
       the last-used file location, starting with 0.

OPTIONS         top

       -r, --ranges file
           Read range(s) separated by newlines from this file.

       -v, --verbose
           Verbose output of the copied ranges.

       -h, --help
           Display help text and exit.

       -V, --version
           Display version and exit.

EXIT STATUS         top

       0
           success

       1
           unspecified failure

NOTES         top

       The copy_file_range(2) system call has some serious caveats: the
       source and destination files must use the same filesystem type,
       and some virtual filesystems (like procfs) won’t work.
       copy_file_range(2) will use reflinks when the filesystem supports
       this. To use reflinks, the file range most often needs to align
       with the filesystem block size on both the source and destination
       file.

AUTHORS         top

       Dick Marinus <dick@mrns.nl>

EXAMPLES         top

           copyfilerange original-file reflink ::

           copyfilerange original-file first-block ::4096

           copyfilerange original-file even-blocks -r <(seq 0 8192 40960|awk '{print $1"::4096"}')

           copyfilerange original-file sparse-file 0:1M:1

           copyfilerange original-file split-first-mb ::1M

           copyfilerange original-file split-remainder 1M::

           copyfilerange split-first-mb join ::

           copyfilerange split-remainder join :1M:

SEE ALSO         top

       copy_file_range(2)

REPORTING BUGS         top

       For bug reports, use the issue tracker
       <https://github.com/util-linux/util-linux/issues>.

AVAILABILITY         top

       The copyfilerange command is part of the util-linux package which
       can be downloaded from Linux Kernel Archive
       <https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/>. This page is
       part of the util-linux (a random collection of Linux utilities)
       project. Information about the project can be found at 
       ⟨https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/⟩. If you have a
       bug report for this manual page, send it to
       util-linux@vger.kernel.org. This page was obtained from the
       project's upstream Git repository
       ⟨git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/utils/util-linux/util-linux.git⟩ on
       2026-05-24. (At that time, the date of the most recent commit that
       was found in the repository was 2026-05-20.) If you discover any
       rendering problems in this HTML version of the page, or you
       believe there is a better or more up-to-date source for the page,
       or you have corrections or improvements to the information in this
       COLOPHON (which is not part of the original manual page), send a
       mail to man-pages@man7.org

util-linux 2.43.devel-739-eee2e 2026-05-24               COPYFILERANGE(1)

HTML rendering created 2026-05-24 by Michael Kerrisk, author of The Linux Programming Interface. For details of in-depth Linux/UNIX system programming training courses that I teach, look here. Hosting by jambit GmbH.