Question

I have a loop in my script, which iterates over an array – myArray and I need to do some copying of files/directories on each iteration. The array can be like this –

myArray=('ajax' 'style/prod_styles' `path/to/some_file.php` 'templates' 'uploadify')

Taking this array, for elements without a /, I need to copy the entire folders and their contents – e.g. ajax, templates, uploadify. But for those having slashes – like style/prod_styles (Note that there can be multiple slashes), I need to copy only the last element (e.g. for /path/to/some/folder I need to copy only folder and its contents) and in case the parent folders are not existing in the destination (e.g. path, to, some are the parent folders), I need to just create those folders and then copy the last element (folder).

Earlier I guessed it would be easy to do an explode (like PHP’s explode()) with / inside the loop and then recursively start from the parent (path directory as per the above example) check if its child directory exists, if not create it, till we are done with the parent of the file/directory to be copied, then do the final copy.

If, however there is something simpler possible in bash to do this, please let me know.

Thanks,
Sandeepan

Answer 1

Unless I misunderstood your question, you probably don’t need to use an explode-like facility to achieve what you want.

Example:

# dir to copy to    
DESTINATION='/path/to/copy/to/.'

# dir to copy from
SOURCE='.' 

# list of dirs to copy
myArray=('ajax' 'style/prod_styles' 'templates' 'uploadify')

# for each directory in myArray ...
for d in "${myArray[@]}"
do
    if [ -f "$d" ]; then # it this is a regular file

        # create base directory
        mkdir -p $DESTINATION/$(dirname "$d")

        # copy the file
        cp "$SOURCE/$d" $DESTINATION/$(dirname "$d")

    elif [ -d "$d" ]; then # it is a directory

        # create directory (including parent) if it doesn't exist
        # - this does nothing if directory exists
        mkdir -p "$DESTINATION/$d"

        # recursive copy
        cp -r "$SOURCE/$d/"* "$DESTINATION/$d/."

    else 

        # write warning to stderr. do nothing with this entry
        echo "WARNING: invalid entry $d." >&2

    fi
done

Update:

Updated sample code to maintains relative path within destination. So styles/prod_styles will be copied to $DESTINATION/styles/prod_styles but all other stuff within styles/ are not copied.

Note that some additional checks need to be added if one cannot be sure that:

• path specified in DESTINATION exists
• not all values in myArray are valid directories (not files)

Update 2:

Example code updated to handle regular files as well as directory.