Dear all,
I have an external hard disk with lots of big files and a lot of small matlab script files .m.

I would like to grab all the files inside that harddisk that have the .m extension or the *.mat file extension (both are matlab files).

Of course this is a
-first-find the *.m files script and
-then copy the files into the hard disk.

What I do not know is how I can also keep the structure of the folders containing the *.m and *.mat files when I will copy them in my local hard disk.

As this external hard disk contains 2TB of data it is not possible to copy all the files first and then remove the unnecessary.
So I have to find and copy only the files I need but with also keeping the tree structure that the external hard disk has .

Can you help me find out an easy way to do that?

Regards
Alex

try this:

find -name *.m > flst
find -name *.mat >> flst
rsync -av --files-from=flst . /destination/dir/

1 members found this post helpful.

Good Idea

I tried first this one

rsync -av --files-from=~/Documents/Documents-rn/Measurement\ campaign/hias\ Code/allmfileslist.txt ~/Documents/Documents-rn/Measurement\ campaign/hias\ Code/

which returns the error below
rsync error: syntax or usage error (code 1) at options.c(1652) [client=3.0.7]


afterwards I removed the destination from the command just to see if rsync will complain

which returned

rsync: failed to open files-from file ~/Documents/Documents-rn/Measurement campaign/hias Code/allmfileslist.txt: No such file or directory
rsync error: syntax or usage error (code 1) at main.c(1437) [client=3.0.7]

but the file is there.
ls ~/Documents/Documents-rn/Measurement\ campaign/hias\ Code/allmfileslist.txt
/home/apa/Documents/Documents-rn/Measurement campaign/hias Code/allmfileslist.txt


For me it seems that rsync can not read paths with spaces (even if there is an escape character at the beginning).

Regards
Alex

Change to the root of the tree you wish to copy. Then, duplicate the directory structure using
Then copy the desired files using
If you want to remove any empty directories afterwards, run
it'll complain about not being able to remove the directories with files, but that's okay; just ignore the warnings. It will only remove the empty directories.

The double dashes above tell the commands that even if the file or directory names begin with a dash, they're still names, not options.

Oww spaces in file names... you should avoid that .
But maybe this works:

rsync -av --filter="+ */" --filter="+ *.m" --filter="+ *.mat" --filter="- *" --prune-empty-dirs 'your source dir/with space' destination/

You may also put \ behind spaces.

Cheers!