Question

Using Terminal and Shell/Bash commands is there a way to retrive specific files from a web directory? I.e.

Directory: http://www.site.com/samples/

copy all files ending in “.h” into a folder

The folder contains text files, and other files associated that are of no use.

Thanks 🙂

Answer 1

There are multiple ways of achieving this recursively:
1. using find

1.1 making directorys using find -p to create recursive folders without errors

cd path;
mkdir backup
find www.site.com/samples/ -type d -exec mkdir -p {} backup/{} \;

1.2 finding specific files and copying to backup folder -p to perserve permissions

find www.site.com/samples/ -name \*.h -exec   cp -p {} backup/{} \;

1. Using tar well actually for reverse type of work i.e. to exclude specific files which the part of the question related to text files matches this answer more:
   You can have as many excludes as you liked added on

   tar --exclude=*.txt --exclude=*.filetype2 --exclude=*.filetype3 -cvzf site-backup.tar.gz www.site.com
   mv www.site.com www.site.com.1
   tar -xvzf site-backup.tar.gz