Copying files

[Jacob Steingart]

Hey, I'm working on a program that involves having a music library. I want to have the songs be imported into a file that will be accessible by the program (in a folder inside the folder containing the program's class file), but I don't want to just move the files. How would I do this? I would be moving audio files.

[Ernest Friedman-Hill]

Hi Jacob,

Copying a file in Java is very simple. You just

1) Open the old file for reading,
2) Open the new file for writing
3) Read each byte from the old file and
4) Write it into the new file
5) Close both the files.

You can either do this with a FileInputStream/FileOutputStream pair, or if you want to get fancy, you can use FileChannels. Either way, it's basically the same.

Since it's binary data, be sure to read and write bytes, not chars.