Feature Request: Copy between filesystems

[c-thiel]

It would be great if we could copy between two different remote filesystems with fsspec.

I think this can be achieved with minimal effort if we check if the lpath is a path in a known filesystem in get/put_file functions in fsspec.spec. Then we could just use lpath.fs.open() instead of open(lpath).

[martindurant]

It is a reasonable request, but not I think that easy to do. Indeed, #41 discusses the idea of a "dispatch" filesystem, where you always give the full URLs where now you give fs-specific paths. The trouble is, most implementations need arguments to work. Either you would have to pass through sets of args for every user method (twice for copy, for origin and target), or have a concept of the "current" instance of each file system type. It would perhaps work better with fsspec path-like objects, where the filesystem is encoded in the object.

aside: I would call this operation "copy" rather than get/put, which to me are synonymous with download/upload.