Bash script to copy a folder's contents and overwrite destination? - bash

Question

I'm just barely familiar with bash scripts, and am trying to achieve being able to specify a source location (a directory with files / sub-directories) and a list of multiple destination directories, along with a list of files / directories from the source to exclude when copying & replacing.
The script should loop through each destination location, copy the files from the source and replace them in the destination location, excluding any files / directories listed in the script to skip.
In PHP it would be something like:
$source = '/home/user1/public_html';
$destinations = array(
'user2',
'user3',
'user4'
);
$exclude = array(
'/uploads/custom',
'/config/conf.php'
);
foreach ($destinations as $destination) {
$dir = '/home/' .$destination. '/public_html';
if (is_dir($dir)) {
exec('cp -R ' .$source. '/* ' .$dir);
// and somehow exclude overwriting any files / directories matching what's in the $exclude array
}
}
So, my question is, how would a bash script with similar functionality be written?

Answer 1

Here's how I ended up doing it:
#!/bin/bash
while IFS= read -r line || [[ $line ]]; do
if [[ -d "$line" ]]; then
rsync -rv --exclude-from "exclude.txt" /home/source/public_html/ "$line"
else
echo "Directory $line does not exist!"
fi
done < "accounts.txt"
This reads from a file called "accounts.txt" that has all the destination account directories in it, one per line. Ex:
/home/user1/public_html
/home/myblog/public_html
It loops through each one, and if the directory exists, it copies the files from /home/source/public_html to the destination. It also reads from a file called "exclude.txt" that includes, one per line, any files or directories to exclude. Ex:
.git
/uploads/custom
/config/conf.php