Copy a hundred...

andreas_skw · 03-18-2008, 10:13 PM

What is the command for copying lot of files? Said in one folder, i want to copy 10 files among 100 files. What is the command? It not efficient if i used cp files.ext one by one isn'it?. Helppp meee pleaseee

bigrigdriver · 03-18-2008, 10:18 PM

How do you distinguish which 10 files of the 100 are to be copied? If that isn't a common feature to focus on, then you have no choice but to cp one by one.

sundialsvcs · 03-18-2008, 10:20 PM

There's a lot of stuff. How about reading help bash?

Ghodmode · 03-18-2008, 10:57 PM

There are so many ways to do it. As bigrigdriver suggested, it depends on how you distinguish the files you want to copy from the ones you don't.

If it's only 10 files out of 100, you might be better off using a file manager with a GUI such as Nautilus on Gnome or Konqueror/Dolphin on KDE.

If you want to use the command line, then suppose, for example, that you want to copy all of the files that were modified more than one day ago ...

Code:

find -mtime +1 -exec -print cp {} \;

I'd break down that command for you, but then you wouldn't have any reason to type man find

--
Ghodmode

jschiwal · 03-18-2008, 11:01 PM

How are the 10 files out of 100 distinguished from the others?

Sometimes you can use wildcards to select the files you want.
example: cp *.jpg pictures/
example: cp spooky{0..9}.txt chapters/

If you want to copy all files in the current directory that are less than 30 minutes old:
example: find ./ -cmin -30 -exec cp '{}' newfiles/ \;

If they are arbitrary files, include them in the argument. The last argument is the destination and needs to be a directory:
copy file1 file2 file3 file4 file5 destdir/