Re: [MLUG] copying many trees together

[Mike Miller <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

On Wed, 5 Sep 2007, Russell Horn wrote:

> I was thinking if you have a lot of directories with foo as a 
> subdirectory, you might want to use find like this:
>
> #!/bin/bash
> for i in `find ./ -maxdepth 2 -name 'foo'`
> do
>   cp -rp $i X/.
> done

You might need to add this before the for loop:

export IFS="
"

Otherwise a directory name with a space in it could cause an error.

Can't this also be done with xargs in this kind of way?...

find . -maxdepth 2 -name foo -print0 | xargs -0 cp {} X/.

That avoids the for loop and the IFS problem.  The use of -print0 and -0 
options deals with the IFS issue by using null characters instead of 
whitespace as the field separator.

I didn't know about maxdepth, so thanks for telling me about that.  I 
would have thought of that kind of approach if I had known that cp doesn't 
overwrite directories -- it just kinda meshes them together and it only 
overwrites files.  It is funny that I didn't know such a thing given how 
much UNIX/Linux work I do, but the need to do that kind of copy doesn't 
come up very often for me.  I was assuming that cp treats directories like 
it treats files -- overwriting when there are collisions unless -i is 
invoked.

By the way, I use -i aliases with mv and cp and recommend that to 
students, but I don't use the -i alias with rm because it becomes a habit 
to always say 'yes' and that defeats the purpose.  Also, it creates an 
implicit expectation that "-i" is on, and that might cause the user to 
make a very big mistake on another system where -i is not on.  It's 
different with mv and cp because the -i is only used in case of 
collisions, not with every invocation of the command as in rm.

Mike

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