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Accepted
LVLAaron
Asked: 2011-02-04 18:45:40 +0800 CST

copy all *.mkv in subdirectories to parent directory

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Roughly, I have a folder setup like this on a linux server: 

/show/season01/show01/shows01e01.mkv
/show/season02/show01/shows02e01.mkv
/show/season03/show01/shows03e01.mkv

I want to eliminate the folders.... I want to copy the *.mkv files to the /show/ directory...

Can someone help me out with this one?

linux files copying

2 Answers

  1. find /show -name "*.mkv" -exec cp {} /show/ \; will do the trick

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  2. Best Answer

    Alex's answer is fine. Here's a couple of alternate ways to do it too:

    1. find + xargs:

      find /show -name "*.mkv" -print0 | xargs -0 -Imkv cp mkv /show/

    2. find + parallel:

      find /show -name "*.mkv" -print0 | parallel -0 -j+0 cp {} /show/

    the only interesting thing about using parallel instead of find/exec is that it can execute multiple commands in parallel. The -j+0 arguments will make it launch as many jobs at once as there are cpu cores. That might not be particularly useful if this operation is completemy disk-bound, but potentially it could speed up copying large numbers of files.

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