Copy all files with a certain extension from all subdirectories

Question

Under unix  I want to copy all files with a certain extension  all excel files  from all subdirectories to another directory  I have the following command   cp --parents  find -name    xls    target directory    The problems with this command are    It copies the directory structure as well  and I only want the files  so all files should end up in  target directory   It does not copy files with spaces in the filenames  which are quite a few    Any solutions for these problems

User · Accepted Answer

--parents is copying the directory structure  so you should get rid of that   The way you ve written this  the find executes  and the output is put onto the command line such that cp can t distinguish between the spaces separating the filenames  and the spaces within the filename  It s better to do something like    find   -name    xls -exec cp    newDir      in which cp is executed for each filename that find finds  and passed the filename correctly  Here s more info on this technique   Instead of all the above  you could use zsh and simply type    cp      xls target directory   zsh can expand wildcards to include subdirectories and makes this sort of thing very easy

User · Answer

I had a similar problem  I solved it using   find dir name    mp3  -exec cp -vuni          dest dir        The      and     executes the copy on each file

User · Answer

I also had to do this myself   I did it via the --parents argument for cp   find SOURCEPATH -name filename  txt -exec cp --parents    DESTPATH

User · Answer

From all of the above  I came up with this version  This version also works for me in the mac recovery terminal    find    -name    xsl  -exec cp -prv        path to targetDir         It will look in the current directory and recursively in all of the sub directories for files with the xsl extension  It will copy them all to the target directory   cp flags are    p - preserve attributes of the file r - recursive  v - verbose  shows you whats being copied

User · Answer

find  SOURCEPATH  -type f -name   PATTERN          while read P  do cp --parents   P   DEST   done   you may remove the --parents but there is a risk of collision if multiple files bear the same name

[bash] Copy all files with a certain extension from all subdirectories

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