CODEWITHSUNDEEP
linuxshellsh
Lorenzo
Lorenzo

Reputation: 29427

Copy files between folders on linux

I have to copy many files from different folders.

  1. Dont know how many are in the source folder
  2. Knows that the folder has the same name of the contained file
  3. Only folders tha contains some file extensions needs to be copied

Example of the source Folder structure

Source folder has the following structure

root
 - folder1
    - folder1.txt
 - folder2
    - folder2.csv
 - folder3
    - folder3.txt

Example of the destination Folder structure

Destination folder should be like this following structure

root
 - folder1
    - folder1.txt
 - folder3
    - folder3.txt

To accomplish the generic copy and recreating the folder structure I have used the following script: 

cp src/**/*.txt dest/
for file in $(ls *.txt); 
   do mkdir -p source/${file%.*}/ && mv $file dest/${file%.*}/; 
done

First of all I copy all the file in the destination folder. Based on the assumption that every file is inside a folder which has the same name then I am moving the files recreating the original structure. This script effectively works very well.

Now the requirement has changed to support multiple level folder structure. E.g.

root
 - folder1
    - folder11
       - folder11.txt
 - folder2
    - folder2.csv
 - folder3
    - folder3.txt

How can I adapt the script to remain generic?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 112

Answers (1)

mickp
mickp

Reputation: 1819

This might work for you:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

shopt -s globstar

src=some/src/path
dest=some/dest/path

for f in "$src"/**/*.txt; do
    d=${f#"$src"} d=$dest/${d%/*}
    mkdir -p -- "$d" || continue
    cp -- "$f" "$d"
done

Upvotes: 2

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