Nifty way to shorten commands involving multiple directories in bash.

{term1,term2,term3} in a directory string will be expanded and will result in 3 separate strings with each term inside the parentheses plugged in.

Examples:

1. Removing files from multiple directories can be done with either

   rm /d/dir1/lib/xyz.jar /d/dir2/lib/xyz.jar /d/dir3/lib/xyz.jar

   or shorter

   rm /d/{dir1,dir2,dir3}/lib/xyz.jar

2. Copying files FROM multiple directories to a single directory

   cp /d/{dir1,dir2,dir3}/lib/xyz.jar /c/doc

   is equal to longer copy command as follows

   cp /d/dir1/lib/xyz.jar /d/dir2/lib/xyz.jar /d/dir3/lib/xyz.jar /c/doc

3. With xargs, the often needed task to copy files to multiple directories can also be done.

   xargs -n 1 cp -v xyz.jar <<< `echo /d/{dir1,dir2,dir3}/lib/`

   The above example is copying (verbosely) xyz.jar from current directory to 3 directories, namely /d/dir1/lib, /d/dir2/lib and /d/dir3/lib