Appending rather than overwriting files when moving - linux

Question

I have the following directory structure:
+-archive
+-a
+-data.txt
+-b
+-data.txt
+-incoming
+-a
+-data.txt
+-c
+-data.txt
How do I do the equivalent of mv incoming/* archive/ but have the contents of the files in incoming appended to those in archive rather than overwrite them?

Answer 1

# move to incoming/ so that we don't
# need to strip a path prefix
cd incoming
# create directories that are missing in archive
for d in `find . -type d`; do
if [ ! -d "../archive/$d" ]; then
mkdir -p "../archive/$d"
fi
done
# concatenate all files to already existing
# ones (or automatically create them)
for f in `find . -type f`; do
cat "$f" >> "../archive/$f"
done
This should find any file in incoming and concatenate it to an existing file in archive.
The important part is to be inside incoming, because else we'd had to strip the path prefix (which is possible, but in the above case unnecessary). In the above case, a value of $f typically looks like ./a/data.txt, and hence the redirection goes to ../archive/./a/data.txt.

Answer 2

run it on the current directory.
find ./incoming -type f | while read -r FILE
do
dest=${FILE/incoming/archive}
cat "$FILE" >> "$dest"
done
the one in incoming/c would not be appended though

Answer 3

Here's a version with proper quoting:
#!/bin/sh
if [ -z "$1" ]; then
# acting as parent script
find incoming -type f -exec "$0" {} \;
else
# acting as child script
for in_file; do
if [ -f "$in_file" ]; then
destfile="${in_file/incoming/archive}"
test -d "$(dirname "$destfile")" || mkdir -p "$_"
cat "$in_file" >> "$destfile" &&
rm -f "$in_file"
fi
done
fi