Hi all,

Let's say I have Dir1 containing Dir11, Dir12, Dir13... to Dir19 as well as some files.
How do I copy Dir1 into let's say Dir2 omitting Dir12 for example?

I need to perform this action for dozens of folders so that doing manually would be too time consuming.

Thanks
M4l3k

The man pages are your friend.

Hi,

Thanks for the quick answer but I meant that I want to copy all the content of Dir1 except from Dir14 (or whatever number I chose in the example above).

Using the -r flag with cp will cause the copy of all the subdirectories => That's not what I want!
Not using the -r flag will ignore the subdirectories => That's not what I want!

I want to be able to specify somewhere the subdirectory I want to ignore. Using one command line would be great!

Thanks

M4l3k

You could try:So you could try(i'd try it with just a couple of directories to start off with, if it doesn't work you won't have spent a lot of time typing).

Forgot to say in post#2 - welcome to LQ

Just go into the parent of dir1..dir12, and do a directory listing, then pipe the output to a series of grep -v "dir-i-want-to-ignore" for the offending directories.

Then also grep -v for "total ##" with the last grep -v in there, then that output gets piped to the sed command which if you use my little regex will trim off everything before the file/foldername. You could modify this slightly to ignore files as well:

cp -rp `ls -l | grep -v "errors" | grep -v "sessions" | grep -v "databases" | grep -v "private" | grep -v "total" | sed s/.*:...//` ~/desination-for-copy/

So just replace "errors", "sessions" "databases", "private" etc with whatever. The grep -v "total" is required!

I did this as such to ignore logs/errors/session data and deployment settings when copying my web applicaiton, and I use it so much I made an alias for it. You can even add env variables after the cp and ls which holds the paths for the source/destination (just have to make sure you set it before you copy each time). Oh, and you could always replace one of the vars with a dot and just be sure to be in either the source or destination folder when you do the backup.

alias bu='cp -rp $BU_SRC/`ls -l $BU_SRC | grep -v "errors" | grep -v "sessions" | grep -v "databases" | grep -v "private" | grep -v "total" | sed s/.*:...//` $BU_DEST'


I realize you posted this a long time ago, but maybe it'll help someone?


EDIT: One more note -- if you don't know the names of the files you want to ignore ahead of time, this command could easily be used in a shell script that takes args for src dest ignore1..ignoreN

like:

./cpignore . ~/backup sessions private databases

It wouldn't be that much effort even if you're not a shell scripter, and it'd be a good opportunity to learn how to do something simple like this.