CODEWITHSUNDEEP
bashshellrecursion
Andrew Hall
Andrew Hall

Reputation: 139

bash shell: recursively search folder and subfolders for files from list

Until now when I want to gather files from a list I have been using a list that contains full paths and using:

cat pathlist.txt | xargs -I % cp % folder

However, I would like be able to recursively search through a folder and it's subfolders and copy all files that are in a plain text list of just filenames (not full paths).

How would I go about doing this?

Thanks!

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1703

Answers (3)

Michael Vehrs
Michael Vehrs

Reputation: 3363

Try something like

find folder_to_search -type f | grep -f pattern_file | xargs -I % cp % folder

Upvotes: 0

tripleee
tripleee

Reputation: 189417

Assuming your list of file names contains bare file names, as would be suitable for passing as an argument to find -name, you can do just that.

sed 's/^/-name /;1!s/^/-o /' pathlist.txt |
xargs -I % find folders to search -type f \( % \) -exec cp -t folder \+

If your cp doesn't support the -t option for specifying the destination folder before the sources, or your find doesn't support -exec ... \+ you will need to adapt this.

Just to explain what's going on here, the input

test.txt
radish.avi
:

is being interpolated into

find folders to search -type f \( -name test.txt -o -name radish.avi \
    -o name : \) -exec cp -t folder \+

Upvotes: 1

sjsam
sjsam

Reputation: 21965

Use the find command.

while read line
do
find /path/to/search/for -type f -name "$line" -exec cp -R {} /path/to/copy/to \;
done <plain_text_file_containing_file_names

Assumption:

The files in the list have standard names without, say newlines or special characters in them.

Note:

If the files in the list have non-standard filenames, tt will be different ballgame. For more information see find manpage and look for -print0. In short you should be operating with null terminated strings then.

Upvotes: 0

Related Questions