I want to copy a file named TEST to a bunch of folders named 1/ 2/ ... 9/
I was trying to use
cp -v TEST ./[1-9]/
# which gives the result:
TEST '->' ./9/fractionofanions
cp: omitting directory './1'
.
.
cp: omitting directory './8'
Can anyone explain why it only copied to folder 9 in the first place, and also any workaround to do what I need? Thanks in advance.
cp can copy multiple files to a directory, but not files to multiple directories. In this instance, you are attempting to copy TEST and directories 1-8 to directory 9/ - see man cp
for more information.
However, you can use the following to copy a file into multiple directories, using find as a helper:
find [1-9] -exec cp file.txt {} \;
As you can verify in man cp, there can only be one target directory specified for cp. You can use a loop, though:
for target in ./[1-9]/ ; do
cp -v TEST "$target"
done
Related
I have a directory structure as :-
/usr/testing/member/
---> public--->folder1--->file1
\----> file2
---> folder3:- contains files and folders
---> folder4:- contains files and folders
---> several files
I want to keep the public folder and all its contents (further folders and files within it) but want to delete everything else under the directory /usr/testing/member/. But that also means member folder is not deleted.
Is there any shell script or command that can be used to achieve this exactly as i stated.
Here's one way to do it:
(cd /usr/testing/member; find . -maxdepth 1 \( ! -name . -a ! -name public \) -exec echo rm -fr {} +)
That is: cd into /usr/testing/member, find all files and directories there, without going further below, and exclude the current directory (".") and any file or directory named "public", and execute a command for the found files.
This will print what would be deleted.
Verify it looks good, and then drop the echo.
I think below will do the work,
$ cd /usr/testing/member/
$ rm -rf $(ls | grep -v "public")
explanation:
we are passing everything inside /usr/testing/member/ but public to rm by making use of -v(exclude) option of grep
I'm trying write a script in linux. Where I have some csv files in Two different folders(A and B) and then after some processing copy of rejected files are moving to Bad Folder.
SO I want bad files to be deleted from Table A and B which have copied to Bad Folder.
Can you help me to write this script for linux?
Best
lets say name of Bad Folder is 'badFolder' and considering 'A', 'B' and 'badFolder' are in same directory
Steps to delete files from folder A and B:
step 1: change current directory to your 'badFolder'
cd badFolder
step 2: delete identical files
find . -type f -exec rm -f ../A/{} \;
find . -type f -exec rm -f ../B/{} \;
The argument -type f tells to look for files, not directories.
The -exec ... \; argument tells that, once it finds a file in 'badFolder', it should run the command rm -f on its counterpart in the A subdirectory.
Because rm is given with the -f option, it will silently ignore files that don't exist.
Also, it will not prompt before deleting files. This is very handy when deleting a large number of files. However, be sure that you really want to delete the files before running this script.
#!/bin/bash
#Set the working folder in which you want to delete the file
Working_folder=/<Folder>/<path>
cd $Working_folder
#command to delete all files present in folders
rm <filenames seperated by space>
echo "files are deleted"
#if you want to delete all files you can use wild card character
# e.g. command rm *.*
# if you want to delete a particular file say for deleting .csv file you can use command rm *.csv command
Set variables containing the paths of your A, B and BAD directories.
Then you can do something along the lines of
for file in ls ${PATH_TO_BAD}
do
rm ${PATH_TO_A}/$file
rm ${PATH_TO_B}/$file
done
This is iterating over the BAD directory and any file it finds, it deletes from the A and B directories.
Let's assume I have following source directory
source/
subdir1/file1
subdir1/file2
subdir2/file3
subdir3/file4
and target directory
target
subdir1/file5
subdir2/file6
subdir4/file7
I would like to move content of source subdirectories to right target subdirectories so result look like this
target
subdir1/file1
subdir1/file2
subdir1/file5
subdir2/file6
subdir2/file3
subdir3/file4
subdir4/file7
Is there some Linux command to do this or must I write a script myself?
To suimmarize, it is important to move, not copy. That rules out cp and rsync but allows mv. mv, however, has the issue that it is not good at merging the old directory into the new.
In the examples that you gave, the target directory had the complete directory tree but lacked files. If that is the case, try:
cd /source ; find . -type f -exec sh -c 'mv "$1" "/target/$1"' _ {} \;
The above starts by selecting the source as the current directory with cd /source. Next, we use find which is the usual *nix utility for finding files/directories. In this case, give find the -type f option to tell it to look only for files. With the -exec option, we tell it to move any such files found to the target directory.
You have choices for how to deal with conflicts between the two directory trees. You can give mv the -f option and it will overwrite files in the target without asking, or you can give it the -n option and it will never overwrite a target file, or your can give it the -i option and it will ask you each time.
In case the target directory tree is incomplete
If the target directory tree is missing some directories that are in the source, the we have to create them on the fly. This adds just minor complication:
cd /source ; find . -type f -exec sh -c 'mkdir -p "/target/${1%/*}"; mv "$1" "/target/$1"' _ {} \;
The mkdir -p command assures that the directory we want exists before we try to move the file there.
Additional notes
The form ${1%/*} is an example of one of the shells powerful features called "parameter expansion". This particular feature is suffix removal. In general, it looks like ${parameter%word} which tells bash to expand word and remove it from the end of parameter. In our case, the name of the parameter is 1, meaning the first argument to the script. We want to remove the file name and just leave behind the directory that the file is in. So, the word /* tells the shell to remove the last slash and any characters which follow.
The commands above use both single and double quotes. They have to be copied exactly for the command to work properly.
To sync dorectory maybe used rsync
Example:
rsync -avzh source/ target/
More info man rsync
Move (no copy)
rsync --remove-source-files -avzh source/ target/
I have a directory with the following structure:
file_1
file_2
dir_1
dir_2
# etc.
new_subdir
I'd like to make a copy of all the existing files and directories located in this directory in new_subdir. How can I accomplish this via the linux terminal?
This is an old question, but none of the answers seem to work (they cause the destination folder to be copied recursively into itself), so I figured I'd offer up some working examples:
Copy via find -exec:
find . ! -regex '.*/new_subdir' ! -regex '.' -exec cp -r '{}' new_subdir \;
This code uses regex to find all files and directories (in the current directory) which are not new_subdir and copies them into new_subdir. The ! -regex '.' bit is in there to keep the current directory itself from being included. Using find is the most powerful technique I know, but it's long-winded and a bit confusing at times.
Copy with extglob:
cp -r !(new_subdir) new_subdir
If you have extglob enabled for your bash terminal (which is probably the case), then you can use ! to copy all things in the current directory which are not new_subdir into new_subdir.
Copy without extglob:
mv * new_subdir ; cp -r new_subdir/* .
If you don't have extglob and find doesn't appeal to you and you really want to do something hacky, you can move all of the files into the subdirectory, then recursively copy them back to the original directory. Unlike cp which copies the destination folder into itself, mv just throws an error when it tries to move the destination folder inside of itself. (But it successfully moves every other file and folder.)
You mean like
cp -R * new_subdir
?
cp take -R as argument which means recursive (so, copy also directories), * means all files (and directories).
Although * includes new_subdir itself, but cp detects this case and ignores new_subdir (so it doesn't copy it into itself!)
Try something like:
cp -R * /path_to_new_dir/
I am facing a copy command problem while executing shell script in RHEL 5.
executed command is
cp -fp /fir1/dir2/*/bin/file1 `find . -name file1 -print`
error is
cp: Target ./6e0476aec9667638c87da1b17b6ccf46/file1 must be a directory
Would you please throw some ideas why it would be failing?
Thanks
Robert.
When cp is called with more than two filenames as arguments, it treats the last one as a target directory, and copies all the files named in the other arguments into that target directory. So, for example,
cp file1 file2 dir3
will create dir3/file1 and dir3/file2. It seems that in your case, the pattern /fir1/dir2/*/bin/file1 matches more than one filename, so cp is trying to treat the result of find as a target directory - which it isn't - and failing.
You can't copy many files to one location unless that location is a directory.
cp should be used thusly: cp sourcefile destinationfile or cp source1 source2 destinationdir.
As the others said you cannot copy multiple files to one file using cp. On the other hand, if you want to append the content of multiple files together into one destination file you can use cat.
For instance:
cat file1 file2 file3 > destinationfile
it is hard to answer without knowing what you are trying to achieve.
If, for example, you want to copy all files named "file1" within a directory structure to a target place /tmp, building the same directory structure there, this command will do the trick:
cd /dir1/dir2
find . -name file1 | cpio -pvd /tmp
You cannot copy multiple multiple files to a file, only to a directory, i.e.
cp file1 file2 file2 file4
is not possible, you need
cp file1 file2 file2 dir1