hopefully simple 'cp' question
 

I want to copy all files with the extension .afm from:

/usr/local/texlive/2011/texmf-dist/fonts/afm

...into a single directory. The problem is that they are split into several levels of subdirectories under that directory. There are TONS of subdirectories and levels in that /afm directory and I don't want to have to drill down into each one to copy the files out. Surely there is a simple way to do this but I am not finding it.

I have tried:

cp *.afm /home/username/afm-files

but it doesn't find any afm files to copy as it only looks in the top level directory.

can anyone tell me what I'm missing here?

Oh I have also tried cp -r which I thought would check the subdirectories but no luck there either.

This is the error I get.

You can use the find command
Kind regards

This is a perfect case to use the find command:This will search in the directory /usr/local/texlive/2011/texmf-dist/fonts/afm recursively for files that match the name *.afm and pass the filenames to the cp command, which will copy the files to /home/username/afm-files.
For more info have a look at

I will give that a try, thanks!

You have to escape the curly brackets, that can simply be done with single quotes '{}'. You also forget the ; at the end of the command, this has also to be escaped, you can do this with single quotes also ';', or you use the backslash \;.
For matching the filename you also need the wildcard *.

Thanks guys, 'find' was exactly what I needed!