How to copy all files with same extension between identical directory structures?

Question

I have 2 independent folders A and B. B has many files with the extension .build. Across A there are a fe subdirectories that have the same structure as subdirectories of B.

For example A has some_path/Tools/Camera/ and B has different_path/Tools/Camera. Say I manually identified 2 subdirectories one in A one in B that have the same structure, I need to copy all .build files from the subdir of B into the one in A.

How would I do this?

Answer 1

Enable the globstar Bash shell option: shopt -s globstar

Now change directory into B and run:

for path in **/; do
    [ -d "<A-dir>/$path" ] && cp -n "$path/"*.build "<A-dir>/$path"
done

This will recursively check each subdirectory in B and see if there is an equivalent subdirectory in A. If there is then it will copy all .build files from the B subdirectory over to A.

Answer 2

There are many ways to do that.

Here's one that comes to mind.

cd different_path
find . -iname '*.build' | while read filename ; do 
    cp -n "$filename" "some_path/${filename#./}" 
done

If there's any chance you have some poorly named files with linebreaks in their names or similar, you might instead use a null separator:

cd different_path
find . -iname '*.build' -print0 | while IFS= read -r -d $'\0' filename ; do 
    cp -n "$filename" "some_path/${filename#./}" 
done

Answer 3

With zsh:

autoload -Uz zmv # best in ~/.zshrc
zmv -C 'A/(**/)(*.build)' 'B/$1$2'

If the corresponding subdirectories are not guaranteed to exist in B, you can change it to:

mkdcp() { mkdir -p -- $2:h && cp -- "$@"; }
zmv -P mkdcp 'A/(**/)(*.build)' 'B/$1$2'

Where zmv uses our mkdcp function instead of cp (with -C) to copy the files.