Let’s say we want to copy a file sample.txt located at ~/Work/Team to another directory ~/Personal. But we don’t want to copy the file alone, but the parent directories too.
In this case, use:
cd ~
cp --parents Work/Team/sample.txt ~/Personal
The result will be, the file sample.txt will be placed as ~/Personal/Work/Team/sample.txt.
Similarly, if we give the location as:
cp --parents ~/Work/Team/sample.txt ~/Personal
Where, ~/ means /home/$USER/.
The sample.txt will be placed as ~/Personal/home/team/Work/Team/sample.txt
This does not mean all the home directory contents are copied.