How to copy or transfer multiple files to Android devices

Last updated on February 22, 2013 by Dan Nanni

ADB (Android Debug Bridge) is a command-line utility that allows you to communicate with Android devices from your computer. Among other things, you can use ADB to copy file(s) to and from Android devices. As of this writing, ADB does not support wildcards to push or transfer multiple files (e.g., *.jpg) to Android devices.

So for example, the following will not work.

$ adb push *.jpg /sdcard/my_photo

If you would like to copy or transfer multiple files to an Android device, use the following trick.

First create a temporary directory, and copy to that directory all files that you want to transfer to your Android device. Then using ADB, push that entire temporary directory to the Android device. ADB will then push all individual files in the directory to the destination location of your Android device. For example:

$ mkdir tmp_dir
$ cp *jpg tmp_dir
$ adb push tmp_dir /sdcard/my_photo

push: tmp_dir/001.jpg -> /sdcard/my_photo/001.jpg
push: tmp_dir/002.jpg -> /sdcard/my_photo/002.jpg
push: tmp_dir/003.jpg -> /sdcard/my_photo/003.jpg
push: tmp_dir/004.jpg -> /sdcard/my_photo/004.jpg
. . . .

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