Unix shell file copy flattening folder structure - unix

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

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 {}.

The only problem with Magnus' solution is that it forks off a new "cp" process for every file, which is not terribly efficient especially if there is a large number of files.
On Linux (or other systems with GNU coreutils) you can do:
find . -name "*.xml" -print0 | xargs -0 echo cp -t a
(The -0 allows it to work when your filenames have weird characters -- like spaces -- in them.)
Unfortunately I think Macs come with BSD-style tools. Anyone know a "standard" equivalent to the "-t" switch?

The answers above don't allow for name collisions as the asker didn't mind files being over-written.
I do mind files being over-written so came up with a different approach. Replacing each / in the path with - keep the hierarchy in the names, and puts all the files in one flat folder.
We use find to get the list of all files, then awk to create a mv command with the original filename and the modified filename then pass those to bash to be executed.
find ./from -type f | awk '{ str=$0; sub(/\.\//, "", str); gsub(/\//, "-", str); print "mv " $0 " ./to/" str }' | bash
where ./from and ./to are directories to mv from and to.

If you really want to run just one command, why not cons one up and run it? Like so:
$ find /foo -name '*.txt' | xargs echo | sed -e 's/^/cp /' -e 's|$| /dest|' | bash -sx
But that won't matter too much performance-wise unless you do this a lot or have a ton of files. Be careful of name collusions, however. I noticed in testing that GNU cp at least warns of collisions:
cp: will not overwrite just-created `/dest/tubguide.tex' with `./texmf/tex/plain/tugboat/tubguide.tex'
I think the cleanest is:
$ find /foo -name '*.txt' | xargs -i cp {} /dest
Less syntax to remember than the -exec option.

As far as the man page for cp on a FreeBSD box goes, there's no need for a -t switch. cp will assume the last argument on the command line to be the target directory if more than two names are passed.

Related

Find and tar files on Solaris

I've got a little problem with my bash script. I'm newbie in unix world, so I find it difficult to deal with an exercise. What I have to do is find files on Solaris server with specific name, modified in specific time and archive them in one .tar file. First two points are easy, but I'm having a nightmare with trying to archive it. The thing is, I constantly archive whole tree of file (with file at the end) to .tar file, but I need just a file. My code looks like this:
find ~ -name "$maska" -mtime -$dni | xargs -t -L 1 tar -cvf $3 -C
where $maska is the name of the file, $dni refers to modification time and $3 is just a archive name. I found out about -C switch, that let's me jump into the folder where desired file is, but when I use it with xargs, it seems just to jump there and do nothing else.
So my question is:
1) is there any possibility of achieving my goal this way?
Please remember, I don't work on gnu tar. And I HAVE TO use commands: tar, find.
Edit: I'd like to specify more my problem. When I use the script for, for example, file a, it should look for it since the point shown in script (it's ~ ) and everything it will find should be in one tar file.
What I got right now is (I'm in /home/me/Scripts):
-bash-3.2$ ./Script.sh a 1000 backup
a /home/me/Program/Test/a/ 0K
a /home/me/Program/Test/a/a.c 1K
a /home/me/Program/Test/a/a.out 8K
So script has done some packing. Next I want to see my packed file, so:
-bash-3.2$ tar -tf backup
/home/me/Program/Test/a/
/home/me/Program/Test/a/a.c
/home/me/Program/Test/a/a.out
And that's the problem. Tar file have all the paths in it, so if I will untar it, instead of getting just the file I wanted to archive, I will replace them in their old places. For visualisation:
-bash-3.2$ ls
Script.sh* Script.sh~* backup
-bash-3.2$ tar -xvf backup
x /home/me/Program/Test/a, 0 bytes, 0 tape blocks
x /home/me/Program/Test/a/a.c, 39 bytes, 1 tape blocks
x /home/me/Program/Test/a/a.out, 7928 bytes, 16 tape blocks
-bash-3.2$ ls
Script.sh* Script.sh~* backup
That's the problem.
So all I want is to pack all those desired file (a in example above) in one tar file without those paths, so it will simply untar in the directory I run the Script.sh.
I'm not sure to understand what you want but this might be it :
find ~ -name "$maska" -mtime -$dni -exec tar cvf $3 {} +
Edit: second attempt after your wrote the main issue is the absolute path:
( cd ~; find . -name "$maska" -type f -mtime -$dni -exec tar cvf $3 {} + )
Edit: third attempt, after you wrote you want no path at all in the archive, maska is a directory name and $3 need to be in the current directory:
mkdir ~/foo && \
find ~ -name "$maska" -type d -mtime -$dni -exec sh -c 'ln -s $1/* ~/foo/' sh {} \; && \
( cd ~/foo ; tar chf - * ) > $3 && \
rm -rf ~/foo
Replace ~/foo by ~/somethingElse if ~/foo already exists for some reason.
Maybe you can do something like this:
#!/bin/bash
find ~ -name "$maska" -mtime -$dni -print0 | while read -d $'\0' file; do
d=$(dirname "$file")
f=$(basename "$file")
echo $d: $f # Show directory and file for debug purposes
tar -rvf tarball.tar -C"$d" "$f"
done
I don't have a Solaris box at hand for testing :-)
First of all, my assumptions:
1. "one tar file", like you said, and
2. no absolute paths, ie if you backup ~/dir/file, you should be able to test extracting it in /tmp obtaining /tmp/dir/file.
If the problem is the full paths, you should replace
find ~ # etc
with
cd ~ || exit
find . # etc
If the tar archive isn't an absolute name, instead, it should be something like
(
cd ~ || exit
find . etc etc | xargs tar cf - etc etc
) > $3
Explanation
"(...)" runs a subshell, meaning some of the tings you change in there have no effects outside of the parens; the current directory is one of them, so "(cd whatever; foo)" means you run another shell, change its current directory, run foo from there, and then you're back in your script which never changed directory.
"cd ~ || exit" is paranoia, it means "cd ~; if that fails, exit".
"." is an alias meaning "the current directory, whatever that is"; play with "find ." vs "find ~" if you don't know what it means, you'll understand it better than if I explained it here.
"tar cf -" means that you create the tar archive on standard output; I think the syntax is portable enough, you may have to replace "-" with "/dev/stdout" or whatever works on solaris (the simplest solution is simply "tar", without the "c" command, but it's ugly to read).
The final "> $3", outside of the parens, is output redirection: rather than writing the output to the terminal, you save it into a file.
So the whole script reads like this:
- open a subshell
- change the subshell's current directory to ~
- in the subshell, find the files newer than requested, archive them, and write the contents of the resulting tar archive to standard output
- the subshell's stdout is saved to $3; because the redirection is outside the parens, relative paths are resolved relatively to your script's $PWD, meaning that eg if you run the script from the /tmp directory you'll get a tar archive in the /tmp directory (it would be in ~ if the redirection happened in the subshell).
If I misunderstood your question, the solution doesn't work or the explanation isn't clear let me know (the answer is too long, but I already know that :).
The pax command will output tar-compatible archives and has the flexibility you need to rewrite pathnames.
find ~ -name "$maska" -mtime -$dni | pax -w -x ustar -f "$3" -s '!.*/!!'
Here are what the options mean, paraphrasing from the man page:
-w write the contents of the file operands to the standard output (or to the pathname specified by the -f option) in an archive format.
-x ustar the output archive format is the extended tar interchange format specified in the IEEE POSIX standard.
-s '!.*/!!' Modifies file operands according to the substitution expression, using regular expression syntax. Here, it deletes all characters in each file name from the beginning to the final /.

Unix to find pdf files from list in text file

I have a directory (for Endnote) that is filled with PDF files (1000's of them). I have used Unix to print a list of all of the pdf files and saved this list as a text file. Most of these pdf files are located in other directories throughout my computer (duplicates).
Now, I want to use the find command to search for duplicates of these pdf files throughout the rest of my computer and if a duplicate is found, move it to a new directory. If a specific file name is found more than once, I want to give each a unique name (ie basename.pdf.1, basename.pdf.2 etc). At the end, I want a single directory for all duplicates so I can double check them and then delete).
However, I do not want find to search the directory in which my list was made from or my Dropbox, as I do not want to move these pdf files (only move the other pdfs scattered throughout my computer).
I have found (I think) how to do all of the individual steps that I need to complete this task, but I cannot seem to put everything together into a working Unix command.
1) In order to find files while excluding a directory:
find -name "what to search for" -not -path "excluded_directory"
or
find build -not \( -path excluded_directory1 -prune \) -not \( -path excluded_directory2 -prune \) -name \*.what_to_find
or my current favorite
find . -name '*.what_to_find' | grep -v exludeddir1 | grep -v excludeddir2
2) In order to read a text file into find and use the lines as search patterns:
find . type f -print | fgrep -f file_list.txt
3) to find and move files
find / -iname "*.what_to_find" -type f -exec mv {} /new_directory \;
or
find / -iname "*.what_to_find" -type f | xargs -I '{}' /new_directory
or (to rename files so files with same name are not just overwritten by each other). I haven't quite figured everything going on in this command out yet...
find -name '*.what_to_find' -type f -exec bash -c 'mv -v "$0" "./$( mktemp "$( basename "$0" ).XXX" )"' '{}' \;
So, I can execute this commands individually, but have not been able to get them to work together as desired (maybe my order of commands is wrong? other problems?).
find . type f -print | fgrep -f file_list.txt | grep -v excludeddir1 | grep -v excludeddir2 -exec bash -c 'echo mv -v "$0" "./$( mktemp "$( basename "$0" ).XXX" )"' '{}' \;
Any help is much appreciated!
Thanks,
Derrick
Well I wasn't able to complete this task exactly how I wanted to, but I found a work around that got the job done.
I printed a list of all PDFs I have in Endnote, then deleted the path name, leaving just the file names (find and replace function in text wrangler). I then used the find command to search this list against my computer, printing all occurances of each PDF.
Then in text wrangler, I deleted all lines containing the initial path to my endnote PDFs, leaving just the desired duplicates.
Next, I used the find command to search for these exact paths and move them to a new folder.
All In all, I got by with the exact same commands I have in my original post, and a little help from text wrangler. Unfortunately I never figured out how to combine all my desired steps into a single unix command.

UNIX get info about file in all directories matching a pattern

I have a bunch of directories that all contain a file /SubDir1/SubDir2/File, and I want to see the memory of each file under directories matching a certain pattern. How do I do this?
So far I have ls -l | grep "pattern* to get a list of the directories, but am stuck at this.
You should use the find command:
find . -name 'pattern*' -printf '%s\t%p\n'
By "memory of each file" I guess you mean file size.
The find command will do a better job:
find . -name "pattern*" -exec du -b {} \;
This will print the file size of every file named File in your arborescence along with the file path.
Bash Pitfall #1: Don't parse ls
You can use find or shell patterns:
for i in pattern*; do
cat "$i"
done
One of your special problems is to get a list of all files under a set of matching directories, and you can do that with a more elaborate pattern:
for i in pattern*/*; do
if [ -f "$i" ]; then
cat "$i"
fi
done
In addition to what SirDarius said, you can also use the -R option to ls to get a recursive listing.
Something like ls -lRh | grep "pattern" should do what you want.

Unix - Find command with tar and gz works well from command line but not working on Script

When i use this command on command line with hard coded values for the parameters $dir,$year,$month it works very well and creates the gzip file. I checked the contents of the gz file and i see the desired results.
find $dir -name '*_$year-$month-*' -type f -print | \
xargs tar -zvcf $dir/log.$year-$month.tar.gz
But when i embed this in a shell script and run, it won't run and gives me this error.
tar: Cowardly refusing to create an empty archive
First of all, your one-liner is full of quoting issues:
$dir will break if the directory name contains whitespace. You need "$dir" instead
Single quotes prevent variable expansion - '*_$year-$month-*' should probably be "*_$year-$month-*".
In your shell script code, find will not match any files (you don't have any filenames with the string _$year-$month-, do you?) and therefore tar will not be supplied with any files to include in the archive.
On a sidenote, using xargs in this particular case is dangerous - if you have too many files, xargs will call tar more than once and any files archived in all but the last run will be erased from the archive as it is overwritten.
Additionally, this command will also break on file paths with whitespace - by default xargs uses whitespace as the argument delimiter. Depending on the version of find and xargs binaries that you are using, there may be a -print0 option for find and a matching -0 option for xargs to deal with this issue:
find ... -print0 | xargs -0 ...
Finally, some xargs versions have an option to avoid calling the specified command if no arguments have been supplied - for GNU xargs that is the -r option:
find ... -print0 | xargs -0 -r ...
Variable substitution doesn't happen within single quotes.
Use double quotes: find "$dir" -name "*_$year-$month-*" ...
(You may use different kinds of quotes within the same argument if it's needed (not here): '*_'"$year")
If you can, attempt to echo the values of $dir, $year, $month from the shellscript onto the console. It is possible that those values are different in the shellscript.
Secodly, which find and tar is the shellscript using? Attempt to use the full paths for diagnostics or modify the value of $PATH to match what you get when you run the command from the command line.

Use grep --exclude/--include syntax to not grep through certain files

I'm looking for the string foo= in text files in a directory tree. It's on a common Linux machine, I have bash shell:
grep -ircl "foo=" *
In the directories are also many binary files which match "foo=". As these results are not relevant and slow down the search, I want grep to skip searching these files (mostly JPEG and PNG images). How would I do that?
I know there are the --exclude=PATTERN and --include=PATTERN options, but what is the pattern format? The man page of grep says:
--include=PATTERN Recurse in directories only searching file matching PATTERN.
--exclude=PATTERN Recurse in directories skip file matching PATTERN.
Searching on grep include, grep include exclude, grep exclude and variants did not find anything relevant
If there's a better way of grepping only in certain files, I'm all for it; moving the offending files is not an option. I can't search only certain directories (the directory structure is a big mess, with everything everywhere). Also, I can't install anything, so I have to do with common tools (like grep or the suggested find).
Use the shell globbing syntax:
grep pattern -r --include=\*.cpp --include=\*.h rootdir
The syntax for --exclude is identical.
Note that the star is escaped with a backslash to prevent it from being expanded by the shell (quoting it, such as --include="*.cpp", would work just as well). Otherwise, if you had any files in the current working directory that matched the pattern, the command line would expand to something like grep pattern -r --include=foo.cpp --include=bar.cpp rootdir, which would only search files named foo.cpp and bar.cpp, which is quite likely not what you wanted.
Update 2021-03-04
I've edited the original answer to remove the use of brace expansion, which is a feature provided by several shells such as Bash and zsh to simplify patterns like this; but note that brace expansion is not POSIX shell-compliant.
The original example was:
grep pattern -r --include=\*.{cpp,h} rootdir
to search through all .cpp and .h files rooted in the directory rootdir.
If you just want to skip binary files, I suggest you look at the -I (upper case i) option. It ignores binary files. I regularly use the following command:
grep -rI --exclude-dir="\.svn" "pattern" *
It searches recursively, ignores binary files, and doesn't look inside Subversion hidden folders, for whatever pattern I want. I have it aliased as "grepsvn" on my box at work.
Please take a look at ack, which is designed for exactly these situations. Your example of
grep -ircl --exclude=*.{png,jpg} "foo=" *
is done with ack as
ack -icl "foo="
because ack never looks in binary files by default, and -r is on by default. And if you want only CPP and H files, then just do
ack -icl --cpp "foo="
grep 2.5.3 introduced the --exclude-dir parameter which will work the way you want.
grep -rI --exclude-dir=\.svn PATTERN .
You can also set an environment variable: GREP_OPTIONS="--exclude-dir=\.svn"
I'll second Andy's vote for ack though, it's the best.
I found this after a long time, you can add multiple includes and excludes like:
grep "z-index" . --include=*.js --exclude=*js/lib/* --exclude=*.min.js
The suggested command:
grep -Ir --exclude="*\.svn*" "pattern" *
is conceptually wrong, because --exclude works on the basename. Put in other words, it will skip only the .svn in the current directory.
In grep 2.5.1 you have to add this line to ~/.bashrc or ~/.bash profile
export GREP_OPTIONS="--exclude=\*.svn\*"
I find grepping grep's output to be very helpful sometimes:
grep -rn "foo=" . | grep -v "Binary file"
Though, that doesn't actually stop it from searching the binary files.
If you are not averse to using find, I like its -prune feature:
find [directory] \
-name "pattern_to_exclude" -prune \
-o -name "another_pattern_to_exclude" -prune \
-o -name "pattern_to_INCLUDE" -print0 \
| xargs -0 -I FILENAME grep -IR "pattern" FILENAME
On the first line, you specify the directory you want to search. . (current directory) is a valid path, for example.
On the 2nd and 3rd lines, use "*.png", "*.gif", "*.jpg", and so forth. Use as many of these -o -name "..." -prune constructs as you have patterns.
On the 4th line, you need another -o (it specifies "or" to find), the patterns you DO want, and you need either a -print or -print0 at the end of it. If you just want "everything else" that remains after pruning the *.gif, *.png, etc. images, then use
-o -print0 and you're done with the 4th line.
Finally, on the 5th line is the pipe to xargs which takes each of those resulting files and stores them in a variable FILENAME. It then passes grep the -IR flags, the "pattern", and then FILENAME is expanded by xargs to become that list of filenames found by find.
For your particular question, the statement may look something like:
find . \
-name "*.png" -prune \
-o -name "*.gif" -prune \
-o -name "*.svn" -prune \
-o -print0 | xargs -0 -I FILES grep -IR "foo=" FILES
On CentOS 6.6/Grep 2.6.3, I have to use it like this:
grep "term" -Hnir --include \*.php --exclude-dir "*excluded_dir*"
Notice the lack of equal signs "=" (otherwise --include, --exclude, include-dir and --exclude-dir are ignored)
git grep
Use git grep which is optimized for performance and aims to search through certain files.
By default it ignores binary files and it is honoring your .gitignore. If you're not working with Git structure, you can still use it by passing --no-index.
Example syntax:
git grep --no-index "some_pattern"
For more examples, see:
How to exclude certain directories/files from git grep search.
Check if all of multiple strings or regexes exist in a file
I'm a dilettante, granted, but here's how my ~/.bash_profile looks:
export GREP_OPTIONS="-orl --exclude-dir=.svn --exclude-dir=.cache --color=auto" GREP_COLOR='1;32'
Note that to exclude two directories, I had to use --exclude-dir twice.
If you search non-recursively you can use glop patterns to match the filenames.
grep "foo" *.{html,txt}
includes html and txt. It searches in the current directory only.
To search in the subdirectories:
grep "foo" */*.{html,txt}
In the subsubdirectories:
grep "foo" */*/*.{html,txt}
In the directories are also many binary files. I can't search only certain directories (the directory structure is a big mess). Is there's a better way of grepping only in certain files?
ripgrep
This is one of the quickest tools designed to recursively search your current directory. It is written in Rust, built on top of Rust's regex engine for maximum efficiency. Check the detailed analysis here.
So you can just run:
rg "some_pattern"
It respect your .gitignore and automatically skip hidden files/directories and binary files.
You can still customize include or exclude files and directories using -g/--glob. Globbing rules match .gitignore globs. Check man rg for help.
For more examples, see: How to exclude some files not matching certain extensions with grep?
On macOS, you can install via brew install ripgrep.
find and xargs are your friends. Use them to filter the file list rather than grep's --exclude
Try something like
find . -not -name '*.png' -o -type f -print | xargs grep -icl "foo="
The advantage of getting used to this, is that it is expandable to other use cases, for example to count the lines in all non-png files:
find . -not -name '*.png' -o -type f -print | xargs wc -l
To remove all non-png files:
find . -not -name '*.png' -o -type f -print | xargs rm
etc.
As pointed out in the comments, if some files may have spaces in their names, use -print0 and xargs -0 instead.
Try this one:
$ find . -name "*.txt" -type f -print | xargs file | grep "foo=" | cut -d: -f1
Founded here: http://www.unix.com/shell-programming-scripting/42573-search-files-excluding-binary-files.html
those scripts don't accomplish all the problem...Try this better:
du -ha | grep -i -o "\./.*" | grep -v "\.svn\|another_file\|another_folder" | xargs grep -i -n "$1"
this script is so better, because it uses "real" regular expressions to avoid directories from search. just separate folder or file names with "\|" on the grep -v
enjoy it!
found on my linux shell! XD
Look # this one.
grep --exclude="*\.svn*" -rn "foo=" * | grep -v Binary | grep -v tags
The --binary-files=without-match option to GNU grep gets it to skip binary files. (Equivalent to the -I switch mentioned elsewhere.)
(This might require a recent version of grep; 2.5.3 has it, at least.)
suitable for tcsh .alias file:
alias gisrc 'grep -I -r -i --exclude="*\.svn*" --include="*\."{mm,m,h,cc,c} \!* *'
Took me a while to figure out that the {mm,m,h,cc,c} portion should NOT be inside quotes.
~Keith
To ignore all binary results from grep
grep -Ri "pattern" * | awk '{if($1 != "Binary") print $0}'
The awk part will filter out all the Binary file foo matches lines
Try this:
Create a folder named "--F" under currdir ..(or link another folder there renamed to "--F" ie double-minus-F.
#> grep -i --exclude-dir="\-\-F" "pattern" *

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