copy files from one disk to two other disks,at the same time

[SarahS93]

There are 3 HDDs, all with ext4.
On HDD1 i have many files, some of them i will copy to HDD2 and HDD3.
Is there a way to do that with one copy-command?
So that only 1 time read from HDD1 and write the data to HDD2 and HDD3 at the same time?

I try this in two terminal windows with two midnight commanders, it works for a moment.
But after a few minutes comes problems.... HDD2 is a litle bit slower than HDD3.
In a machine with 16GB of Memeory does it works so for a moment, but by copying files they are have a size of a few hundrets of GB it will not work.

[Cyker]

tee is quite a nice utility for this sort of thing; I wanted to do a similar thing, copy from a really slow memory card to two other usb sticks. Found this bit of code at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/195655/how-to-copy-a-file-to-multiple-directories-using-the-gnu-cp-command which might do what you want...

[Hu]

In general, cd dir ; tar xf - is dangerous, since a failure to cd dir means tar will extract in the previous working directory. It is better to use cd dir && tar xf - or to use tar -C dir -x -f -, both of which will avoid running tar if the cd dir fails.

[Cyker]

Oooh, good call!