Complex cp : only *.jpg files while excluding DIRs

LancerNZ · 02-15-2005, 10:53 AM

The school I'm teaching at has not yet put up their network so all computers are completely separate. As the teacher, I'm trying to transfer newly made files from the /home DIRS across all computers.

e.g: if Sarah made a new /home/sarahb/my_picture.jpg then I want to put this onto floppy and transfer (preserving permissions etc) onto the other computers.

Something like...

\cp -puRf /home/*/*.jpg /mnt/floppy/

Then once the files are transferred, I would simply place the floppy with combined collected files into each computer, and cp the contents back over the /home dir in each to distribute all files throughout.

However, here are the caveats...

1) I want to mainatain the subdir trees.
2) I ONLY want to do *.jpg files
3) At the same time I want to EXCLUDE the /home/teacher/ directory.

As I originally clones the drives via IDE cable (which took a long time) permissions etc for /home accounts are identical.

I'm thinking that two shell scripts should do this, and could reside on the floppy. One to suck the needed files (place floppy in computer drive and hit "/mnt/floppy/get_student_jpg.sh", the other to redistribute them (place floppy indrive and hit "copy_to_home.sh")

Any ideas?

david_ross · 02-15-2005, 12:27 PM

You could do it using find - perhaps something like this:

Code:

cd /home
find ./ -name "*.jpg" \! -regex "./teacher.*" -exec mkdir /mnt/floppy/\`dirname {}\`\\\;cp {} /mnt/floppy/ \;

Copying them back should just be a standard recursive copy:
cp -r /mnt/floppy/* /home/

LancerNZ · 02-16-2005, 02:58 AM

Thanks for the reply.

However - your code (which I carefully copied and pasted from the forum) did not work. I got a few "cannot create ./studentname/somedir/anotherdir/file.jpg file already exists" errors and an empty directory called `dirname manifesting onto /mnt/floppy.

Could the forum be have added some of those //'s to rhw code? I don't understand -regex options well enough to be able to sort this one in good time for tomorrow's lessons (it's late and I'm just back from parent meetings).

theYinYeti · 02-16-2005, 03:12 AM

Source:

Code:

find /home -type d -regex "/home/teacher" -prune -o \( -iname "*.jpg" -o -iname "*.jpeg" \) -print | xargs tar cjf /mnt/floppy/backup.tbz

Dest:

Code:

cd / && tar xjpf /mnt/floppy/backup.tbz

I'm not sure the floppy will be big enough every time, though.
Besides, with pictures, it might be, that bzipping the tar actually makes it bigger instead of smaller. In that case, remove the "j" from each tar command, and replace the ".tbz" extention with a simple ".tar".

Yves.