CODEWITHSUNDEEP
bashshellcommand-line
Phocs
Phocs

Reputation: 2510

Bash scripts that merge the contents of two directories

Example: merge dirA/ dirB/ dirDEST/

All existing files (not directories) in dirA and in dirB must be moved to dirDEST. If two files with the same name appear in both dirA and dirB, the file moved to dirDEST must be the most recent modified one, the other must remain in the source directory.

When I have the list files from dirA and dirB (e.g find /dirA -type f and find dirB/ -type f) how can I compare e select the right files and move with mv?

For compare modification time of files I could use:

if [ "$file1" -ot "$file2" ]; then
   ...
fi

Upvotes: 0

Views: 153

Answers (1)

ceving
ceving

Reputation: 23826

First create a union of all files and then go through the list and check for the three cases

  • file exists in both directories
  • file exists only in one of the two directories

This is an example without find just using globing. This means it works only for one directory level.

#! /bin/bash

union()
{
  local f
  for f in dir{A,B}/*; do
    basename "$f"
  done |
  sort -u
}

for f in $(union); do
  a="dirA/$f"
  b="dirB/$f"
  if [ -e "$a" ]; then
    if [ -e "$b" ]; then
      # file exists in dirA and dirB
      if [ "$a" -nt "$b" ]; then
        mv "$a" dirC/.
      else
        mv "$b" dirC/.
      fi
    else
      # file exists in dirA but not in dirB
      mv "$a" dirC/.
    fi
  else
    # file exists in dirB but not in dirA
    mv "$b" dirC/.
  fi
done

Upvotes: 1

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