Question

I have a folder called “week1”, and in that folder there are about ten other folders that all contain multiple files, including one called “submit.pdf”. I would like to be able to copy all of the “submit.pdf” files into one folder, ideally using Terminal to expedite the process. I’ve tried cp week1/*/submit.pdf week1/ as well as cp week1/*/*.pdf week1/, but it had only been ending up copying one file. I just realized that it has been writing over each file every time which is why I’m stuck with one…is there anyway I can prevent that from happening?

Answer 1

You don’t indicate your OS, but if you’re using Gnu cp, you can use cp week1/*/submit.pdf --backup=t week/ to have it (arbitrarily) number files that already exist; but, that won’t give you any real way to identify which-is-which.

You could, perhaps, do something like this:

 for file in week1/*/submit.pdf; do cp "$file" "${file//\//-}"; done

… which will produce files named something like “week1-subdir-submit.pdf”

For what it’s worth, the "${var/s/r}" notation means to take var, but before inserting its value, search for s (\/, meaning /, escaped because of the other special / in that expression), and replace it with r (-), to make the unique filenames.

Edit: There’s actually one more / in there, to make it match multiple times, making the syntax:

             "${ var           /        /                 \/  /      -    }"
                 take "var"    replace  every instance of /   with   -