how to distribute all files in a data directory with automake - autoconf

I have some data files used in my package. They are 74 files in a directory. According to automake manual section 9.3 Architecture-independent data files I can list them individually
dist_pkgdata_DATA = mydir/file1 mydir/file2 ..... mydir/file74
That's too much typing. Any one can suggest a good solution?
There is a slightly different solution for such a problem, but it is essentially the same mechanism (listing all files manually). Since programmers are lazy, we don't want to type them. Furthermore, each time you need to add new files or remove old file, you have to update the Makefile.am.

If you don't want to list files at all the compressed file approach with it's install/uninstall hooks look like a reasonable approach for a lot of files, especially if they are essentially "write only".
If you want to have those files normally inspectable you'll have to do something like:
MYDIR = mydir
EXTRA_DIST = $(MYDIR)
install-data-local:
test -z $(pkgdatadir) || $(MKDIR_P) $(pkgdatadir)
find "$(MYDIR)" -type f -exec $(INSTALL_DATA) {} $(pkgdatadir) \;
The "too much typing" part is due to the dist_ prefix -- automake is being told to package up those files for the distribution tarball. EXTRA_DIST on the other hand will include the entire contents of a directory into the tarball, but you have to specify what to do with those files later. And it really doesn't check, either. If mydir has 2 files or 74 files, it's all the same to automake.
Another way to solve it is to have another program in bootstrap.sh (before autoreconf is invoked) make a makefile fragment defining dist_pkgdata_DATA which is then included in Makefile.am. This still doesn't fix the correct number of files problem either.

Related

bash: get path from current directory given sub-directory name

Trying to write a script to clean up environment files after a resource is deleted. The problem is all the script is given as input is the name of the resource (this cannot be changed) with zero identifying information beyond that. How can I find the path of the directory the resource is sitting in?
The directory is set up a bit like the following, although much more extensive. All of these are directories, not files. There can be as many as 40+ directories to search, but the desired one is generally not more than 2-3 directories deep.
foo
aaa
aaa_green
aaa_blue
bbb
ccc
ccc_green
bar
ddd
eee
eee_green
eee_blue
fff
fff_green
fff_blue
fff_pink
I might be handed input like aaa_green or just ddd.
As an example, given eee_blue as input, I need to know eee_blue's path from the working directory so I can cd there and delete the directory. IE, I would expect to return bar/eee/eee_blue/ or bar/eee/, either is acceptable.
The "best" option I can see currently is to cd into the lowest level of each directory via multiple greps, get each's contents and look for a match, and when it does (eventually) match save that cd'ing as the path. This frankly sounds awful and inefficient.
The only other alternative method I could think of was a straight recursive grep, but I tested it and at 8 minutes it still hadn't finished running.
This script needs to run on both mac and linux, although in a desperate pinch I could go linux only.
The standard Unix tool for doing this sort of task is the find command. The GNU version of find has more extensive options than the POSIX specification (by quite a margin). The version on macOS Sierra (and Mac OS X) is similar to the GNU version. I found an online manual for OS X 10.9 at Apple find, but there's probably a better location somewhere.
It looks like you might want to run:
find . -name 'eee_blue'
which will print the names of matching files or directories, or perhaps:
find . -name 'eee_blue' -exec rm -fr {} +
which will run the rm -fr command on each name. You can run a custom script you create in place of rm -fr if you prefer; if the logic is complex, it's what I do.
Be extremely cautious before using rm -fr automatically!

Is it possible to somehow undo the results of the mv command?

Here's the problem. I had a bunch of files in a directory. Then I created another directory in that directory. Then I cobbled together this command:
find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -exec mv {} ./1 \;
This command was supposed to take all the files in the directory and move them to that newly-created directory, but instead of providing the name of the directory, I screwed up and typed 1, as you can see from the code snippet. So, I ended up having just one text file named 1 that now contains the stuff from one of the disappeared files and that's all.
Is there any chance I could recover the lost files (or possibly the actual data from the files--they were all text files) or are they pretty much permanently gone?
Before:
misha#hp-laptop:~/Documents/prgmg/work$ ls
add.s bubble.s cpuid.s div.s hello.s mult.s sum.s test.s
a.out c demo.s gas.txt max.s print_arr.s test.c
misha#hp-laptop:~/Documents/prgmg/work$ mkdir asm
After:
misha#hp-laptop:~/Documents/prgmg/work$ ls
1 asm c
So, as you can see, I wanted to put all assembly language files into the asm directory. And as things stand now, 1 is a text file and it contains the stuff from gas.txt.
No. Not easily. Sorry.
Restoring from backup would be the best option.
See the answers to the question "Recovering accidentally deleted files" over at Unix & Linux, if you feel like doing a bit of low-level file access.

How can I preserve aliases when copying folders on the command line in OSX?

I'm trying to write a personal backup command-line utility on OSX. Let's say I have two folders:
foo/bar/
foo/baz/
foo/bar contains, among other things, OSX aliases to files in foo/baz:
foo/bar/file_alias# -> foo/baz/file
I want to copy both foo/bar and foo/baz to an external hard drive, but for various reasons I do not just want to copy the entire folder foo. I can't figure out a way to copy these folders separately and make the aliases come out right in the end:
cp -r foo/bar /external_hd/foo/bar follows the aliases, replacing them with the original files.
cp -R foo/bar /external_hd/foo/bar preserves the aliases, but they (not surprisingly) continue to point to the original files (e.g. foo/baz/file, not external_hd/foo/baz/file).
rsync -avE foo/bar /external_hd/foo/bar (see this question) seems to do the same thing as cp -R.
Is there any way to accomplish this without copying the entire parent folder foo?
I know of no way where you can automatically copy folders and relink symbolic links to a new destination without some manual intervention. If you know the new paths its quite simple to script, though.
For your specific example; the following should do the trick to relink:
cd /external_hd/foo
find . -type l | while read x; do y=$(readlink "$x" | sed s'|/foo|/external_hd/foo|'); ln -sf "$y" "$x";done
rsync will get you close, the command:
rsync -avHER --safe-links foo/{bar,baz} /external_hd/
will copy the two folders, preserve "safe" relative symlinks between, and ignore "unsafe" symlinks - those that may reference files outside of the copied tree. Change it to:
rsync -avHER --copy-unsafe-links foo/{bar,baz} /external_hd/
and "safe" relative symlinks are preserve and "unsafe" symlinks are replaced by their destination.
If you only have "safe" relative symlinks the first option will do, the second option may do if some extra copying is OK.
However, the definition of "safe" is over-restrictive. Any absolute symlink is "unsafe" even if its target is within the copied tree. Furthermore even a relative link which goes too far towards the root, or maybe is just too complicated, is also "unsafe".
If you need to fix this it should be possible, as the above options show rsync is pretty close to what you need and the source code is available from Apple's Open Source site. Examine the code around the options --links, --copy-links, --copy-unsafe-links & unsafe-links and you may find fixing the definition of "safe" is fairly easy (and you can re-write the symlinks to use the shortest possible relative path at the same time).
HTH

How can I recursively copy a directory into another and replace only the files that have not changed?

I am looking to do a specific copy in Fedora.
I have two folders:
'webroot': holding ALL web files/images etc
'export': folder containing thousands of PHP, CSS, JS documents that are exported from my SVN repo.
The export directory contains many of the same files/folders that the root does, however the root contains additional ones not found in export.
I'd like to merge all of the contents of export with my webroot with the following options:
Overwriting the file in webroot if export's version contains different code than what
is inside of webroot's version (live)
Preserve the permissions/users/groups of the file if it is overwritten (the export
version replacing the live version) *NOTE I would like the webroots permissions/ownership maintained, but with export's contents
No prompting/stopping of the copy
of any kind (ie not verbose)
Recursive copy - obviously I
would like to copy all* files
folders and subfolders found in
export
I've done a bit of research into cp - would this do the job?:
cp -pruf ./export /path/to/webroot
It might, but any time the corresponding files in export and webroot have the same content but different modification times, you'd wind up performing an unnecessary copy operation. You'd probably get slightly smarter behavior from rsync:
rsync -pr ./export /path/to/webroot
Besides, rsync can copy files from one host to another over an SSH connection, if you ever have a need to do that. Plus, it has a zillion options you can specify to tweak its behavior - look in the man page for details.
EDIT: with respect to your clarification about what you mean by preserving permissions: you'd probably want to leave off the -p option.
-u overwrites existing files folder if the destination is older than source
-p perserves the permission and dates
-f turns off verbosity
-r makes the copy recursive
So looks like you got all the correct args to cp
Sounds like a job for cpio (and hence, probably, GNU tar can do it too):
cd export
find . -print | cpio -pvdm /path/to/webroot
If you need owners preserved, you have to do it as root, of course. The -p option is 'pass mode', meaning copy between locations; -v is verbose (but not interactive; there's a difference); -d means create directories as necessary; -m means preserve modification time. By default, without the -u option, cpio won't overwrite files in the target area that are newer than the one from the source area.

Can you use tar to apply a patch to an existing web application?

Patches are frequently released for my CMS system. I want to be able to extract the tar file containing the patched files for the latest version directly over the full version on my development system. When I extract a tar file it puts it into a folder with the name of the tar file. That leaves me to manually copy each file over to the main directory. Is there a way to force the tar to extract the files into the current directory and overwrite any files that have the same filenames? Any directories that already exist should not be overwritten, but merged...
Is this possible? If so, what is the command?
Check out the --strip-components (or --strippath) argument to tar, might be what you're looking for.
EDIT: you might want to throw --keep-newer into the mix, so any locally modified files aren't overwritten. And I would suggest testing new releases on a development server, then using rsync or subversion to carry over the changes.
I tried getting --strip-components to work and, while I didn't try that hard, I didn't get it working. It kept flattening the directory structure. In searching, I came across the following command that seems to do exactly what I want:
pax -r -f patch.tar -s'/patch///'
It's not tar, but hey, it works... Replace the words "patch" with whatever your tar file name is.
The option '--strip-components' allows you to trim parts of the embedded filenames. With that it is possible to do what you want.
For more help check out http://www.gnu.org/software/tar/manual/html_section/transform.html
I have just done:
tar -xzf patch.tar.gz
And it overwrites all the files that the patch contains.
I.e., if the patch was created for the contents of the app folder, I would extract it there. Results would be like this:
tar.gz contains: oldfolder/someoldfile.txt, oldfolder/newfolder/newfile.txt
before app looks like:
app/oldfolder/someoldfile.txt
Afterwards, app looks like
app/oldfolder/someoldfile.txt
oldfolder/newfolder/newfile.txt
And the "someoldfile.txt" is actually updated to what was in the tar.gz
Maybe this doesn't work with regular tar, only tar.gz. But I doubt it. I think it should work for everything, as long as user has write permissions.

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