Bashscripts.org

Hi guys,

I need to copy a bunch of files into a directory, but keeping the directory structure within the include directory.. This is what I have so far.
find . -name '*h' -print | xargs -i -t cp ./{} include/

Thanks,
Ed.

Well i think you need to create the dir's first then...

you could do something like this in a script i guess:


This should create all directories and copy all files found in $path where $pattern matches
(ps. It's untested since I don't have anything to test it with ds.

Best regards
Fredrik Eriksson

Hmmm.. interesting.

Thanks.

Hmm... I did have something to test it with ... but I get all these errors...

mkdir: `/home/james/google-breakpad/google-breakpad-read-only/src/client/minidump_file_writer-inl.h' exists but is not a directory
mkdir: `/home/james/google-breakpad/google-breakpad-read-only/src/client/minidump_file_writer.h' exists but is not a directory
mkdir: `/home/james/google-breakpad/google-breakpad-read-only/src/http_upload/include/http_upload.h' exists but is not a directory

Anyway if you know how to fix it, I would appreciated.

The sed fails for some reason. Can't say I really tested it before I wrote it
Something is probably wrong with the regular expression. Most likely it's just that the last set (inside []) doesn't match all types... from a quick look i believe it's missing "_" atleast.

The regexp now tells sed to match 0 or more characters that is either A to Z, a to z, 0 to 9 and "."
This should also match "_" since your files apperantly has that... also "-" might be a good plan

So something like this [A-Za-z0-9._-], it's still quite greedy thou so if you figure out some more special characters you should add them.
Just so you know, \ ( ) [ ] needs to be escaped so the shell doesn't interpret them as operators for your regexp.

Best regards
Fredrik Eriksson

Well.. but where it is actually failing.. is to create the directories.. it's somehow thinking that the files are the directories..

mkdir: `/home/egutarra/google-breakpad/google-breakpad-read-only/src/common/mac/externals/google-toolbox-for-mac/Foundation/GTMNSString+Replace.h' exists but is not a directory

It actually puts all the files in the directory I specify.. but it doesn't create the directory structure.

GTMObjectSingleton.h string_utilities.h
GTMPath.h string_utils-inl.h
GTMProgressMonitorInputStream.h symbol_supplier.h
GTMRegex.h system_info.h
GTMScriptRunner.h types.h

Thinking of which I just thought of something easier.. could I do a recursive RM that could erase all files except those that are *.h.. That would be an easier way to achieve the same thing more easily

Yes that's what I just explained... since the sed isn't removing some specific filenames (those which contain +_- and so on) the mkdir is trying to make a directory named identical to the file it's itterating.

true, why didn't i think of that



Something like that might do the trick actually... i would edit the -exec part before you test run it thou.
(As usual I don't have a linux machine to test it on atm.)

You could test running just: find $destination -type f -not -iname \*.h
and see if you get and .h files in that search

Best regards
Fredrik Eriksson

edit: ofcourse you need to change $destination to where you want to do your search when you're not running it as a script

Thanks Frederick.. worked like a charm. It's now saved under my cool scripts

Do you know how I can erase the directories that did not contain any *.h files?

That'll probably take some more doing... but I can recommend the "-type d" syntax for find to get only directories.