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Zifre
Asked: 2009-05-03 08:35:43 +0800 CST

Recursively copying hidden files - Linux

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Is there an easy way to recursively copy all hidden files in a directory to another directory? I would like to back up just all the settings files in a home directory, not the normal files. I tried:

cp -R .* directory

but it recognizes . and .. and recursively copies all the non-hidden files too. Is there a way to get cp to ignore . and ..?

linux files copy cp

6 Answers

  1. Almost every time this can be solved just with:

    cp -R .[a-zA-Z0-9]* directory

    It's pretty unusual to have a hidden file that doesn't start with one of those characters.

    Other pattern matches are available (.??*, .[^.]*) - see the comments

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  2. Best Answer

    My favorite to move dirs in general has been:

    tar cvf - . | (cd /dest/dir; tar xvf -)

    which tars up the current directory to stdout then pipes it to a subshell that first cd's to the destination directory before untarring stdin. Simple, direct, extensible - consider what happens when you replace the () with an ssh to another machine. Or to answer your question you might do:

    tar cvf - .* --exclude=\. --exclude=\.\. | (cd /dest/dir; tar xvf -)
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  3. You could use rsync.

    rsync -a ./ /some/other/directory/

    that will copy the contents of the current directory (including dot files, but not including ..)

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  4. I implore you, step away from plain shell expansion on the cp command line - shell expansion has all sorts of ahem "interesting" corner cases (unwanted recursion caused by . and .., spaces, non-printable stuff, hardlinks, symbolic links, and so on.) Use find instead (it comes in the findutils package, in case you don't have it installed - which would be weird, all distributions install it by default):

    find -H /path/to/toplevel/dir/ -maxdepth 1 -name '.*' -a \( -type d -o -type f -o -type l \) -exec cp -a '{}' /path/to/destination/dir/ \;

    Step by step explanation:

    • -H will cause find not to follow symlinks (except if the actual toplevel directory name you gave it is a symlink; that it will follow.)
    • /path/to/toplevel/dir/ is, obviously, supposed to be replaced by you with the path do the directory which hosts the settings files and directories you want to back up.
    • -maxdepth 1 will stop find from recursively descending into any directories whose name starts with a dot. We don't need it to recurse, cp will do that for us, we just need the names at this level.
    • -name '.*' tells find that we want all names that start with a dot. This won't work correctly if the environment variable POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, but it rarely (if ever) is. This is the first match condition we have specified so far.
    • a \( ....... \) is an and followed by a more complex condition in parentheses (I've used ..... to replace it, it's explained below.) We need to escape the parentheses since they'll otherwise be (mis)interpreted by the shell, hence the backslash in front of them,
    • -type d -o -type f -o -type l are three conditions with an or between them. -type d matches directories, -type f matches regular files, and -type l matches symlinks. You can select what you want - for example, if you don't want to backup settings directories, omit -type d (and the -o right behind it, obviously.)
    • -exec ..... \; tells find to execute a command every time a match is encountered. The end of the command is marked by a semicolon, which we again need to escape with a backslash to avoid shell interpretation. Within that command line, you need to use {} where you want the name of the currently encountered match to end up. Since shells might also misinterpret the curly braces, you should place them in apostrophes, as in '{}'. The command we want to execute in this case is cp -a '{}' /path/to/destination/dir/ (-a means archive, which recurses in subdirectories, copies symlinks as links, and preserves permissions and extended attributes, and /path/to/destination/dir/ is obviously the name of the destination directory - replace it.)

    So, in plain English, this find command line says this:

    Start at /path/to/toplevel/dir/. Do not descend into any subdirectories. Find all directories, files and symlinks whose name starts with a dot. For each of those you have found found, copy it to /path/to/destination/dir/ preserving nature, permissions, and extended attributes.

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  5. I've always used .??* to find hidden files without getting "." and "..". It might miss ".a" or something, though, but I never have one of those.

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  6. Much better answers here; https://superuser.com/questions/61611/how-to-copy-with-cp-to-include-hidden-files-and-hidden-directories-and-their-con

    It describes for example using shopt for a native bash solution

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