Question

I’ve been staring at this for hours, but am not sure what i’m doing wrong. I’m trying to write a simple script to move 100 or so files from various locations in an external list. Should be simple enough, and when I run the command through irb, everything works for that one file, but when running the script I get an error. Here’s my script.

#! /opt/local/bin/ruby
require 'fileutils.rb'

list_of_files = File.read "files_to_copy.txt"
source_dir = "/Volumes/data/moved_from_share/"
dest_dir = "/Volumes/data/testeroooo/"

list_of_files.each do |line|
  copy_from = source_dir + line
  copy_to = dest_dir + line
  puts copy_from
  puts copy_to
  puts
  FileUtils.cp_r(copy_from, copy_to)
end

Here is some example input from “files_to_copy.txt”:

Accounting HG/Accounts Payable/2011/2011_06/ebi_Inv_218876.pdf
Accounting HG/Accounts Payable/2011/2011_06/expeditors_1050006142.tif
Accounting HG/Accounts Payable/2011/2011_06/expeditors_7050627938.tif

And lastly, here is my output with error:

/Volumes/data/moved_from_share/Accounting PG/Accounts Payable/2011/2011_07/
/Volumes/data/testeroooo/Accounting PG/Accounts Payable/2011/2011_07/

/System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/fileutils.rb:1255:in `copy': unknown file type: /Volumes/data/moved_from_share/Accounting PG/Accounts Payable/2011/2011_07/ (RuntimeError)
    from /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/fileutils.rb:451:in `copy_entry'
    from /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/fileutils.rb:1324:in `traverse'
    from /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/fileutils.rb:448:in `copy_entry'
    from /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/fileutils.rb:423:in `cp_r'
    from /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/fileutils.rb:1395:in `fu_each_src_dest'
    from /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/fileutils.rb:1411:in `fu_each_src_dest0'
    from /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/fileutils.rb:1393:in `fu_each_src_dest'
    from /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/fileutils.rb:422:in `cp_r'
    from copy_it.rb:14
    from copy_it.rb:8:in `each'
    from copy_it.rb:8

If you have any suggestions, I would love to hear them! Thank you!

Answer 1

Your file list likely contains Accounting PG/Accounts Payable/2011/2011_07/ as an entry, which is a Directory, not a File. This should work perfectly fine, as you’re using cp_r.

You could override it to only copy files (assuming your file list includes the subfolder items too):

if File.file?(copy_from)
  FileUtils.cp_r(copy_from, copy_to)
end