Copying files in and out of a container

Podman enables users to move files into and out of a running container. This result is achieved using the podman cp command, which can move files and folders to and from a container. Its usage is quite simple and will be illustrated in the next example.

First, let's start a new Alpine container:

$ podman run -d --name alpine_cp_test alpine sleep 1000

Now, let's grab a file from the container – we have chosen the /etc/os-release file, which provides some information about the distribution and its version ID:

$ podman cp alpine_cp_test:/etc/os-release /tmp

The file has been copied to the host /tmp folder and can be inspected:

$ cat /tmp/os-release
NAME="Alpine Linux"
ID=alpine
VERSION_ID=3.14.2
PRETTY_NAME="Alpine Linux v3.14"
HOME_URL=https://alpinelinux.org/
BUG_REPORT_URL="https://bugs.alpinelinux.org/"

In the opposite direction, we can copy files or folders from the host to...