I am trying to use:

find /sourcedirectory/ -type f -name '*' -mtime 0 -exec cp -fprv '{}' /destinationdirectory/ /;

or variations thereof. The intention is to copy all downloaded files from the source directory in the last 24 hours to another location. If I use cp -fprv from to. The directory structure and attributes are maintained.

Using the line above copies all files into a single directory.

I have checked out the man pages and other postings on the site ... but stuck.

Look forward to hearing from you all.

Just a guess, but if you leave the cp part out and take a look at the 'find' created list, does it show full path names or just filenames? And what if you used -r (recursive) with cp, would it help?

When I work with 'find' I first form the command that creates the list, run it like that and check that the list looks ok, and after that start thinking about the command I want to execute over the files.

I'm sure the answer is in
if you take the time to read them.

I'm not at any kind of Unix shell right now, so..sorry, but can't help more than that for now.

The problem here is that -exec execute commands on every item found, one after one, so the cp command is executed on each single file and every information about the directory structure is lost. You may think to use a "for" loop as an alternative.

Something like this?

for i in 'find /source/* -type f -mtime 0'
do
cp -fprv $i /target/$i
done

Do the single quotes just group the commands together?

But this will not keep the directory structure either. I will go and have a look at cp and mcp at little more.

use invert quotes ``:

DIMonS, the for loop you have posted will do exactly the same as the previous find command with the -exec option. The issue is that you don't really want to recursively copy an entire directory, but only some files inside a directory structure based on their modification time. So, the option -r to cp is not what you need. The problem here is to create under the destination directory the same directories (if they still do not exist) to copy the source files into.
A possibility is right in man cp! Look at the --parents option...

TVM. All sorted.