LinuxQuestions.org - Copying jpegs recursively while preserving the directory structure

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Copying jpegs recursively while preserving the directory structure

So I have a bunch of directories:

dir1
dir2
dir3
etc.

which themselves all contain subdirectories:

dir1

subdir1

subdir2

etc.

and at the lowest level they contain all of these jpegs that I need. The problem is that I only need some of them. They're named like this:

pic1.jpg
pic1_med.jpg
pic1_small.jpg
pic2.jpg
pic2_med.jpg
etc.

I want to just grab the ones without the size suffix and copy them all to another set of folders, while preserving the directory structure. The numbering all starts at 1 for each low level subdirectory, so I think that the directory structure is the only way to not get them mixed up.

I know that cp has a recursive option -r but how do I just extract the ones without the underscore? And then how do I preserve the directory structure when I move them over?

Code:

find . -type f -regextype posix-extended -regex ".*pic[0-9]+\.jpg" -exec cp -p --parents "{}" /TARGET/PATH/ \;

The above should work; run it from the top of the source tree - it will recursively copy the pictures matching filename of "pic" followed by "number(s)" ending with ".jpg", with no underscore/extension, and create the target directory tree as the source was.

I tested it - and it works for me - but as with anything free, no guarantee!

Cheers,
Sasha

PS - I encourage you to read the manpages for `cp` and `find` and understand the options I used.