Standard concise way to copy a file in Java?

I would avoid the use of a mega api like apache commons. This is a simplistic operation and its built into the JDK in the new NIO package. It was kind of already linked to in a previous answer, but the key method in the NIO api are the new functions "transferTo" and "transferFrom".

http://java.sun.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/nio/channels/FileChannel.html#transferTo(long,%20long,%20java.nio.channels.WritableByteChannel)

One of the linked articles shows a great way on how to integrate this function into your code, using the transferFrom:

public static void copyFile(File sourceFile, File destFile) throws IOException {
    if(!destFile.exists()) {
        destFile.createNewFile();
    }

    FileChannel source = null;
    FileChannel destination = null;

    try {
        source = new FileInputStream(sourceFile).getChannel();
        destination = new FileOutputStream(destFile).getChannel();
        destination.transferFrom(source, 0, source.size());
    }
    finally {
        if(source != null) {
            source.close();
        }
        if(destination != null) {
            destination.close();
        }
    }
}

Learning NIO can be a little tricky, so you might want to just trust in this mechanic before going off and trying to learn NIO overnight. From personal experience it can be a very hard thing to learn if you don't have the experience and were introduced to IO via the java.io streams.

As toolkit mentions above, Apache Commons IO is the way to go, specifically FileUtils.copyFile(); it handles all the heavy lifting for you.

And as a postscript, note that recent versions of FileUtils (such as the 2.0.1 release) have added the use of NIO for copying files; NIO can significantly increase file-copying performance, in a large part because the NIO routines defer copying directly to the OS/filesystem rather than handle it by reading and writing bytes through the Java layer. So if you're looking for performance, it might be worth checking that you are using a recent version of FileUtils.

Note that all of these mechanisms only copy the contents of the file, not the metadata such as permissions. So if you were to copy or move an executable .sh file on linux the new file would not be executable.

In order to truly a copy or move a file, ie to get the same result as copying from a command line, you actually need to use a native tool. Either a shell script or JNI.

Apparently, this might be fixed in java 7 - http://today.java.net/pub/a/today/2008/07/03/jsr-203-new-file-apis.html. Fingers crossed!

Three possible problems with the above code:

1. If getChannel throws an exception, you might leak an open stream.
2. For large files, you might be trying to transfer more at once than the OS can handle.
3. You are ignoring the return value of transferFrom, so it might be copying just part of the file.

This is why org.apache.tools.ant.util.ResourceUtils.copyResource is so complicated. Also note that while transferFrom is OK, transferTo breaks on JDK 1.4 on Linux (see Bug ID:5056395) – Jesse Glick Jan

Fast and work with all the versions of Java also Android:

private void copy(final File f1, final File f2) throws IOException {
    f2.createNewFile();

    final RandomAccessFile file1 = new RandomAccessFile(f1, "r");
    final RandomAccessFile file2 = new RandomAccessFile(f2, "rw");

    file2.getChannel().write(file1.getChannel().map(FileChannel.MapMode.READ_ONLY, 0, f1.length()));

    file1.close();
    file2.close();
}

A little late to the party, but here is a comparison of the time taken to copy a file using various file copy methods. I looped in through the methods for 10 times and took an average. File transfer using IO streams seem to be the worst candidate:

Here are the methods:

private static long fileCopyUsingFileStreams(File fileToCopy, File newFile) throws IOException {
    FileInputStream input = new FileInputStream(fileToCopy);
    FileOutputStream output = new FileOutputStream(newFile);
    byte[] buf = new byte[1024];
    int bytesRead;
    long start = System.currentTimeMillis();
    while ((bytesRead = input.read(buf)) > 0)
    {
        output.write(buf, 0, bytesRead);
    }
    long end = System.currentTimeMillis();

    input.close();
    output.close();

    return (end-start);
}

private static long fileCopyUsingNIOChannelClass(File fileToCopy, File newFile) throws IOException
{
    FileInputStream inputStream = new FileInputStream(fileToCopy);
    FileChannel inChannel = inputStream.getChannel();

    FileOutputStream outputStream = new FileOutputStream(newFile);
    FileChannel outChannel = outputStream.getChannel();

    long start = System.currentTimeMillis();
    inChannel.transferTo(0, fileToCopy.length(), outChannel);
    long end = System.currentTimeMillis();

    inputStream.close();
    outputStream.close();

    return (end-start);
}

private static long fileCopyUsingApacheCommons(File fileToCopy, File newFile) throws IOException
{
    long start = System.currentTimeMillis();
    FileUtils.copyFile(fileToCopy, newFile);
    long end = System.currentTimeMillis();
    return (end-start);
}

private static long fileCopyUsingNIOFilesClass(File fileToCopy, File newFile) throws IOException
{
    Path source = Paths.get(fileToCopy.getPath());
    Path destination = Paths.get(newFile.getPath());
    long start = System.currentTimeMillis();
    Files.copy(source, destination, StandardCopyOption.REPLACE_EXISTING);
    long end = System.currentTimeMillis();

    return (end-start);
}

The only drawback what I can see while using NIO channel class is that I still can't seem to find a way to show intermediate file copy progress.