Copy files and preserving directory structure - linux

Question

Here's what I have to do: Find all files which are in the directory src (or in its subdirectories) and have str in their name and copy them to dest preserving the subdirectory structure. For example I have the directory dir1 which contains foo.txt and the subdirectory subdir which also contains foo.txt. After running my script (with str=txt and dest=dir2) dir2 should countain foo.txt and subdir/foo.txt. So far I have come up with this code:
while read -r line; do
cp --parents $line $dest
done <<< "$(find $src -name "*$str*")"
which almost does the job except that it creates dir1 inside of dir2 and the desired files are inside dir2/dir1. I also tried doing it with the -exec option of find but didn't get better results.

Answer 1

IIUC, this can be done with find ... -exec. Let's say we have the following directory:
$ tree
.
└── src
├── dir1
│   └── yet_another_file_src
└── file_src
2 directories, 2 files
We can copy all files that contain *src* to /tmp/copy-here like this:
$ find . -type f -name "*src*" -exec sh -c 'echo mkdir -p /tmp/copy-here/$(dirname {})' \; -exec sh -c 'echo cp {} /tmp/copy-here/$(dirname {})' \;
mkdir -p /tmp/copy-here/./src
cp ./src/file_src /tmp/copy-here/./src
mkdir -p /tmp/copy-here/./src/dir1
cp ./src/dir1/yet_another_file_src /tmp/copy-here/./src/dir1
Notice that I used echo instead of really running this command -
read the output and make sure that this is what you want to
achieve. If you're sure that this would be what you want just remove
echo like this:
$ find . -type f -name "*src*" -exec sh -c 'mkdir -p /tmp/copy-here/$(dirname {})' \; -exec sh -c 'cp {} /tmp/copy-here/$(dirname {})' \;
$ tree /tmp/copy-here
/tmp/copy-here
└── src
├── dir1
│   └── yet_another_file_src
└── file_src
2 directories, 2 files
EDIT:
And of course, you can always use rsync:
$ rsync -avz --include "*/" --include="*src*" --exclude="*" "$PWD" /tmp/copy-here