Comments on: Skimming subfolders for files to copy

By: Kevin

Kevin — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 21:51:31 +0000

Actually, “*.*” and “*” are different. “*.*” only matches files with a dot in the name. And, if you are going to do -name “*”, you may as well leave the -name predicate out all together:

find /pathtoinputdir -type f -exec cp -urvp {} \;

By: Gabe

Gabe — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 18:35:09 +0000

Also “*.*” is unnecessary (reminds me of DOS syntax), “*” will do.

By: IsaacG

IsaacG — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 15:02:14 +0000

Two more comments on the find syntax:
– The {} don’t need quoting
– With GNU find you can replace the \; with + to pass many filenames to one cp command opposed to fork()ing a cp for each file

By: Jose Catre-Vandis

Jose Catre-Vandis — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 14:49:10 +0000

I use a similar command:

find /pathtoinputdir/ -name “*.*” -type f -exec cp -urvp ‘{}’ /pathtooutputdir \;

By: IsaacG

IsaacG — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 14:16:28 +0000

For the ** to work in bash, you first need: shopt -s globstar

By: Cosay Nold

Cosay Nold — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 13:55:56 +0000

For some reason, I have never found the Find command particularly easy to learn, and I’ve used the GNU and BSD versions of the command. It’s probably because I need the command so infrequently.

By: wolfo

wolfo — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 12:39:16 +0000

My approach would have been just ‘cp -Rv /media/**/*jpg /destination’.
/media/*jpg only substitutes files that are directly inside /media. I use zsh, but it worked with bash too.

On the other note, I should try to learn more about ‘find’. So far, it rarely behaved the way I anticipated =)