Question

On the UNIX bash shell (specifically Mac OS X Leopard) what would be the simplest way to copy every file having a specific extension from a folder hierarchy (including subdirectories) to the same destination folder (without subfolders)?

Obviously there is the problem of having duplicates in the source hierarchy. I wouldn’t mind if they are overwritten.

Example: I need to copy every .txt file in the following hierarchy

/foo/a.txt /foo/x.jpg /foo/bar/a.txt /foo/bar/c.jpg /foo/bar/b.txt 

To a folder named ‘dest’ and get:

/dest/a.txt /dest/b.txt 

Answer 1

In bash:

find /foo -iname '*.txt' -exec cp \{\} /dest/ \; 

find will find all the files under the path /foo matching the wildcard *.txt, case insensitively (That’s what -iname means). For each file, find will execute cp {} /dest/, with the found file in place of {}.