Question

I have a question about unix command line. I have many files like these:

/f/f1/file.txt

/f/f2/file.txt

/f/f3/file.txt

and so on.

I had like copy all file.txt with their father folder in another folder g like:

/g/f1/file.txt

/g/f2/file.txt

/g/f3/file.txt

I can’t copy all content of folder f because in each sub-folder f1, f2, ... I have many other files that I don’t want copy.

How could I do this with the command line? Eventually using a bash script?

Answer 1

Manual for cp shows this option –

--parents
              use full source file name under DIRECTORY

So if you are on bash v4 you can do something like this –

[jaypal:~/Temp/f] tree
.
├── f1
│   ├── file.txt  # copy this file only with parent directory f1
│   ├── file1.txt
│   └── file2.txt
└── f2
    ├── file.txt  # copy this file only with parent directory f2
    ├── file1.txt
    └── file2.txt

2 directories, 6 files
[jaypal:~/Temp/f] mkdir ../g
[jaypal:~/Temp/f] shopt -s globstar
[jaypal:~/Temp/f] for file in ./**/file.txt; do cp --parents "$file" ../g ; done
[jaypal:~/Temp/f] tree ../g
../g
├── f1
│   └── file.txt
└── f2
    └── file.txt

2 directories, 2 files