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bashsubdirectorycp

Copy list of files in nested subdirectories

I have a set of subdirectories, with files inside them:

├── dir1
│   ├── file_a.type
│   ├── file_b.type
│   ├── file_c.type
│   └── file_d.type
├── dir2
│   ├── file_e.type
│   ├── file_f.type
│   ├── file_g.type
│   └── file_h.type
└── README.md

I can guarantee the uniqueness of each file name. The directory naming convention is n[some unique random number].

I have a text file with a subset of these files

file_g.type
file_a.type
file_e.type

I would like to copy all of the files matching the names in that text file to a new directory.

I have tried using xargs to copy, however this does not work because of the subdirectories.

xargs -a files.txt cp -t new_dir each

I could recursively copy all the files in the sub-directories to a new directory and go from there.
However this is not possible due to disk size and bandwidth issues.

What is an efficient way to do this using standard bash utilities ?

Solution

  • If you have the file names in a file named files.txt:

    while read file
do
    cp dir[12]/"${file}" -t new_dir
done < files.txt

    With xargs it can be done like this:

    xargs -a files.txt -IFILE bash -c 'cp dir[12]/"FILE" -t new_dir'