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mcExchange
Asked: 2016-03-29 04:02:16 +0800 CST

Copy a list of files to remote computer while creating parent folders

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I have a list of files lying in subdirectories which I have created by calling find: 

for f in $(find . -name "myFile.txt"); do 
    echo "$f" >> filelist.txt;
done

The content of filelist.txt looks like this:

./First/Path/To/File/myFile.txt
./Second/Path/To/File/myFile.txt
./Third/Path/To/File/myFile.txt
...

Now I want to copy all these files to a remote computer such that they are placed in the corresponding folders: 

remoteComputerName:/some/root/directory/First/Path/To/File/myFile.txt
remoteComputerName:/some/root/directory/Second/Path/To/File/myFile.txt
remoteComputerName:/some/root/directory/Third/Path/To/File/myFile.txt

However on the remote computer the folder structure First/Path/To/File/ etc, does not exist yet and also I don't want to copy the entire directories but only the file myFile.txt in it.

I know that on a local computer this works using the command 

while read p; do cp --parents $p /some/root/directory ; done < filelist.txt

However for remote computers using scp this option --parents doesn't work anymore. Also rsync doesn't create a parent directory if it's missing. Does someone know a solution?

command-line

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Using rsync:

    rsync -av --files-from=filelist.txt . remote:/some/location/

    Run this from the directory where you have run find, the root of the directories, where the filelist.txt currently is.

    --files-from reads files (newline separated) to be copied from the file filelist.txt.

    --files-from should always use relative path (unlike mentioning directly), although you can be explicit about it:

    rsync -av --relative --files-from=filelist.txt . remote:/some/location/
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