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Accepted
Rpj
Asked: 2013-03-28 00:34:34 +0800 CST

How to copy a subset of files from a certain folder

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I have the following directory structure.

dirA/[fileA, someB, barC, fileD, someE, barF] dirB/[fileA, barC, someE]

I want to copy only files from dirA to dirB which are already present in dirB. How do I do this selective copy?

filesystem

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    You could for instance use the find command with the -exec option. You'd probably use some syntax like the following (has to be run in dirB, and be aware that it's recursive):

    find ./ -type f -exec cp '../dirA/{}' ./ \;

    The -type f tells find to only take into account regular files, the -exec says: run the following command on every file. The \; at the end terminates the command to be run. The {} is a placeholder that is replaced by the actual filename by find. Check out the man page of find for details and other usage examples.

    Here's what happens on my PC:

    desktop:~$ mkdir dirA
desktop:~$ mkdir dirB
desktop:~$ cd dirA
desktop:~/dirA$ touch foo bar this
desktop:~/dirA$ cd ..
desktop:~$ cd dirB
desktop:~/dirB$ touch bar this
desktop:~/dirB$ find ./ -type f -exec cp -v '../dirA/{}' ./ \;

»../dirA/./this“ -> »./this“
»../dirA/./bar“ -> »./bar“
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