Question

I have two directories and one is empty.

The first directory has many sub directories with hidden files. When I cp -r content from first directory to the second one, the hidden files gets copied too. Any solutions to escape them?

Answer 1

You can use rsync instead of cp:

rsync -av --exclude=".*" src dest

This excludes hidden files and directories. If you only want to exclude hidden directories, add a slash to the pattern:

rsync -av --exclude=".*/" src dest