Maintain directory structure copying `find` results

Let’s say you have a directory structure consisting of files owned by various users, but you want to copy only the files of a particular user to another path, but maintain the directory structure in the destination path. If you just use something like this…

find /path/to/src/ -user foo -exec cp -a {} /path/to/dst/

…you end up with all of the files in /path/to/dst/ with the original directory structure flattened out.

I came up with the following to solve the problem:

find /path/to/src/ -user foo | while read FILE \
do \
    DIR=$( dirname ${FILE} ); \
    mkdir -p /path/to/dst/${DIR}; \
    cp -d --preserve=mode,ownership,timestamp ${FILE} /path/to/dst/${DIR}; \
done

Here’s a brief explanation. Since the find command returns the relative path of the matching item in it’s STDOUT, we can use the dirname command to get the original relative directory name. We then create the directory if it doesn’t exist, and finally do the copy.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 27th, 2009 at 10:56 and is filed under Linux, One-Liners. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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Remove old messages from Plesk/Qmail Maildir mailboxes | rugmonster.org says:

01 December 2009 at 11:47

[...] I needed to remove messages older than a week old for a list of email accounts on a Plesk system running Qmail. I put together the following BASH script to locate the messages using find and back them up outside of the mailbox (just in case). This builds on the technique I used in my previous post, Maintain directory structure copying `find` results. [...]

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