Hey Everyone,

This is the first time ever that I have used these forums. I've installed Mandrake 10.0 on my system as a dual boot system with winxp. I am still becoming familiar with linux and need a little help.
I would like a script that will copy the contents on my documents on my winxp system to the Documents directory in my home/jamie/ directory. This I can do with:

echo "Update Documents in Linux with My Documents in Winxp"
echo "----------------------------------------------------"
echo "Updating Pictures From WinXP"
cd /mnt/win_c/Document*/James*/My*/My*P*/ && tar -cf - . | (cd /home/jamie/Documents/Pictures && tar -xpvf -)
echo "Updating Music From WinXP"
cd /mnt/win_c/Document*/James*/My*/My*M*/ && tar -cf - . | (cd /home/jamie/Documents/Music && tar -xpvf -)

The only problem that I am encountering is that this also copies all of the junk that windows puts into this directories, such as Destop.ini, Thumbs.db and AlbumArt_*.jpg files. I need a line or two that will remove all files with a spefic extension and from all sub-directories as well.

Can anyone help me out? Thanks!

Welcome to LQ!

You might be interested in reading about the find command (man find). It's a bit long, but it's an extremely useful tool. To give you an example, this command would find every file that does not end in ".db":
find /mnt/win_c/Document* ! -name "*.db"

As another example, this command will find every file that does not end with ".db" or ".jpg":
find /mnt/win_c/Document* \( ! -name "*.db" \) -a \( ! -name "*.jpg" \)

Don't let the \( and \) throw you... they're just used to separate the conditions of the search. The -a says that files must satisfy both requirements (a logical AND if you're familiar with that terminology).

With find, you can also execute a command. To simplify things, I'll go back to the first example. Suppose you wanted to copy the file to a specific directory. You can do this:
find /mnt/win_c/Document* ! -name "*.db" -exec cp {} /some/backup/directory \;

The {} is replaced with the path and filename of the file that matched.

So, you can use find to try and perform the task you want (it does have some limitations though), or you can use it to generate a file list that you can feed into a script.

Thank you, That was very helpful.
-Newbie

I now have this and it still won't work!
Any help??

I want this so that if I download songs or pictures into winxp, I can update my files on my linux drive!


echo "Update Documents in Linux with My Documents in Winxp"
echo "----------------------------------------------------"
echo "Updating Pictures From WinXP"
cd /mnt/win_c/Document*/James*/My*/My*P*/ && tar -cf - . | (cd /home/jamie/Documents/Pictures && tar -xpvf -)
echo "Updating Music From WinXP"
cd /mnt/win_c/Document*/James*/My*/My*M*/ && tar -cf - . | (cd /home/jamie/Documents/Music && tar -xpvf -)
echo "Removing *ini, *.jpg, *.db from Music"
rm {find /home/jamie/Documents/Music* \( ! -name "*.mp3" \) -a \( ! -name "*.mwa" \)}
echo "Removing *.ini and *.db from Pictrures"
rm {find /home/jamie/Pictures/Music* \( ! -name "*.jpg" \) -a \( ! -name "*.gif" \) -a \( ! -name "*.bmp" \)}
echo "Finished!"

Alright, how about this:

change your "rm { }" lines to
find /home/jamie/Documents/Music* \( ! -name "*.mp3" \) -a \( ! -name "*.mwa" \) -exec rm {} \;

find /home/jamie/Pictures/Music* \( ! -name "*.jpg" \) -a \( ! -name "*.gif" \) -a \( ! -name "*.bmp" \) -exec rm {} \;

Okay, It's working, although I am gettting errors as rm is trying to remove directories but it cannot (Good Thing!) Anyways, here is what I have now. Again, it works but it would be nice to avoid all of those "errors"
Any ideas? Thanks again.

echo "Update Documents in Linux with My Documents in Winxp"
echo "----------------------------------------------------"
echo "Updating Pictures From WinXP"
cd /mnt/win_c/Document*/James*/My*/My*P*/ && tar -cf - . | (cd /home/jamie/Documents/Pictures && tar -xpvf -)
echo "Updating Music From WinXP"
cd /mnt/win_c/Document*/James*/My*/My*M*/ && tar -cf - . | (cd /home/jamie/Documents/Music && tar -xpvf -)

echo "Updating File Permissions..."
cd /home/jamie/Documents/
chmod -R 777 *

echo "Removing *ini, *.jpg, *.db from Music"
find /home/jamie/Documents/Music* \( ! -name "*.mp3" \) -a \( ! -name "*.wma" \) -a \( ! -name "*.MP3" \) -a \( ! -name "*.WMA" \) -a \( ! -name "*.Wma" \) -a \( ! -name "*.Mp3" \) -exec rm -f {} \;

#echo "Removing *ini and *.db from Pictrures"
find /home/jamie/Documents/Pictures* \( ! -name "*.jpg" \) -a \( ! -name "*.gif" \) -a \( ! -name "*.bmp" \) -a \( ! -name "*.JPG" \) -a \( ! -name "*.Jpg" \) -a \( ! -name "*.GIF" \) -a \( ! -name "*.Gif" \) -a \( ! -name "*.BMP" \) -a \( ! -name "*.Bmp" \) -exec rm -f {} \;

echo "Finished!"

Ok, here we go...

You can change your find command slightly to allow for case insensitive matching based on the filename. All you have to do is change each '-name' option to '-iname'. For instance '-iname "*.jpg"' will match *.JPG, *.Jpg, *.jPg, *.jpg, etc.

You can also tell find to match only files (and not directories) using another option. All you need to do is add "-type f" after the directory in the find command.

Here's an example of both to clarify:
find /home/jamie/Documents/Music* -type f \( ! -iname "*.mp3" \) -a \( ! -iname "*.wma" \) -exec rm -f {} \;

There we go. Everything is working good. Thanks for your time.