Recursively add a file to all sub-directories

Question

How do I recursively add(or touch) a file into the current directory, as well as all sub-directories?

For example,
I would like to turn this directory tree:

.
├── 1
│  ├── A
│  └── B
├── 2
│  └── A
└── 3
 ├── A
 └── B
 └── I 
9 directories, 0 files

into

.
├── 1
│  ├── A
│  │  └── file
│  ├── B
│  │  └── file
│  └── file
├── 2
│  ├── A
│  │  └── file
│  └── file
├── 3
│  ├── A
│  │  └── file
│  ├── B
│  │  ├── file
│  │  └── I
│  │  └── file
│  └── file
└── file
9 directories, 10 files

Answer 1

How about:

find . -type d -exec cp file {} \;

From man find:

 -type c
 File is of type c:
 d directory
 -exec command ;
 Execute command; All following arguments to find are taken 
 to be arguments to the command until an argument consisting 
 of `;' is encountered. The string `{}' is replaced by the 
 current file

So, the command above will find all directories and run cp file DIR_NAME/ on each of them.

• ChuckCottrill: or, find . -type d -exec touch file {} \
• Ned64: or, find . -type d -exec touch {}/file\;
• FLUSHER: Also you may want to use a hard/soft link here since changing the file in every location can be a real pain

Answer 2

If you just want to create an empty file, you can use touch and a shell glob. In zsh:

touch **/*(/e:REPLY+=/file:)

In bash:

shopt -s globstar
for d in **/*/; do touch -- "$d/file"; done

Portably, you can use find:

find . -type d -exec sh -c 'for d; do touch "$d/file"; done' _ {} +

Some find implementations, but not all, let you write find . -type d -exec touch {}/file \;

If you want to copy some reference content, then you'll have to call find in a loop. In zsh:

for d in **/*(/); do cp -p reference_file "$d/file"; done

In bash:

shopt -s globstar
for d in **/*/; do cp -p reference_file "$d/file"; done

Portably:

find . -type d -exec sh -c 'for d; do cp -p reference_file "$d/file"; done' _ {} +

Answer 3

When wanting to touch files called $name in the current directory and in all subdirectories, this will work:

find . -type d -exec touch {}/"${name}" \;

Note that the comment by ChuckCottrill to the answer by terdon does NOT work, as it will only touch the file called $name in the current directory and the directory itself.

It will not create files in subdirectories as requested by the OP, while this version here will.

Answer 4

To actually just create a file, you can use touch with find:

$ find . -type d -exec touch {}/file \;

Answer 5

Another example that I was just testing given your's is to create consecutive files in specific sub directory like I have it here.

├── FOLDER
│  ├── FOLDER1
│  └── FOLDER2
├── FOLDER
│  ├── FOLDER1
│  └── FOLDER2
└── FOLDER
 ├── FOLDER1
 └── FOLDER2

I used this command below to create in only the FOLDER2 dir files with consecutive number sequence like file{1..10}

for d in **/FOLDER2/; do touch $d/file{1..10}.doc; done