Shell script for coppying files from one directory to another - bash

I am trying to write a shell script to copy files with some specific name and creation/modification date from one folder to another. I am finding it hard that how I can do this ?
However i have tried this till now.
srcdir="/media/ubuntu/CA52057F5205720D/Users/st4r8_000/Desktop/26 nov"
dstdir="/media/ubuntu/ubuntu"
find ./ -type f -name 'test*.csv' -mtime -1
Now my question is, is it possible to put that find command into a if condition to get the files found by find.
I am very new to shell script. any help would be really appreciated.

What I found useful for this is the following code. I am sharing this here so that some one who is new like me can take some help from it:
#!/bin/bash
srcdir="/media/ubuntu/CA52057F5205720D/Users/st4r8_000/Desktop/office work/26 nov"
dstdir="/media/ubuntu/ubuntu"
find "$srcdir" -type f -name 'test*.csv' -mtime -1 -exec cp -v {} "$dstdir" \;

Related

Using fish shell builtins with find exec

I'm trying to source a file that I can get from the output of find using these commands:
find ./ -iname activate.fish -exec source {} \;
and
find ./ -iname activate.fish -exec builtin source {} \;
But both these commands give the error of the form find: ‘source’: No such file or directory or find: ‘builtin’: No such file or directory. Seems like exec of find is not able to recognize fish's builtins ?
What I basically want to achieve is a single command that will search for Python's virtualenv activate scripts in the current directory and execute them.
So doing something like -exec fish -c 'source {}; \ would not help. I've tried it as well and it doesn't error out but does not make the changes either.
Any ideas what can be done for this ?
Thanks!
Perhaps you need:
for file in (find ./ -iname activate.fish)
source $file
end
# or
find ./ -iname activate.fish | while read file
source $file
end
Command substitution executes the command, splits on newlines, and returns that list.
As mentioned in comments, seems like -exec does not run in or affect the current shell environment. So find -exec is not gonna work for my use case.
Instead, this will work:
source (find ./ -iname activate.fish)

Trying to find files containing an identifier, then move them to a new directory within terminal

I'm a beginner with this stuff and seem to be running into an issue.
Basically, I have many files with names containing a keyword (let's call it "Category1") within a directory. For example:
ABC-Category1-XYZ.txt
I'm trying to move them from a directory into another directory with the same name as the keyword.
I started with this:
find /path_A -name "*Category1*" -exec mv {} /path_A/Category1 \;
It spit out something like this:
mv: rename /path_A/Category1 to /path_A/Category1/Category1: Invalid
Argument
So I did some fiddling and hypothesized that the problem was caused by the command trying to move the directory Category1 into itself(maybe). I decided to exclude directories from the search so it would only attempt to move files. I came up with this:
find /path_A -name "*Category1*" \(! -type d \) -exec mv {} /path_A/Category1 \;
This did move the files from their original location to where I wanted them, but it still gave me something like:
mv: /path_A/Category1/ABC-Category1-XYZ.txt and
/path_A/Category1/ABC-Category1-XYZ.txt are identical
I'm no expert, so I could be wrong... but I believe the command is trying to find and move the files from their original directory, then find them again. The directory Category1 is a subdirectory of the starting point, /path_A, So i believe it is finding the files it just moved in the directory Category1 and attempting to move them again.
Can anyone help me fix this issue?
You are creating new files that find tries to process. Safest approach is to move them somewhere else not in the path_A you are searching with find.
Or you can use prune to ignore that directory if you don't have any other directory matching:
find /path_A -name '*Category1*' -prune -type f -exec mv {} /path_A/Category1/ \;
Although another post has been accepted, let me post a proper answer.
Would you please try:
find /path_A -name 'Category1' -prune -o -type f -name '*Category1*' -exec mv -- {} /path_A/Category1/ \;
The option -prune is rather a command than a condition. It tells find to
ignore the directory tree specified by the conditions before -prune.
In this case it excludes the directory Category1 from the search.
The following -o is logical OR and may be interpreted something like instead or else. The order of the options makes difference.
Please be noticed the 1st category1 is the directory name to exclude and the 2nd *Category1* is the filenames to find.
If you are not sure which files are the result of find, try to execute:
find /path_A -name 'Category1' -prune -o -type f -name '*Category1*' -print
then tweak the options to see the change of output.

Using a variable in find

I'm trying to look for a file from a database. I'm getting the data from a php file just fine. It's just this one line I'm having issues with:
directory=`find ./ -type f -name "*$thismodelnormal*" -exec ls -la {} \;`
$thismodelnormal is just a string, but it's dynamic based on data from the database. Can anyone enlighten me on how to get this done? I've done a good bit of research already and couldn't find a solution.. surely somebody has done this before though.
Adding set -x at the top of my script allowed me to view the command that are actually being run. In this case my command needed to be
directory=`find ./ -type f -name "*"$thismodelnormal"*" -exec ls -la {} \;`
NOTE the two sets of double quotes. One is for the find itself and the other extracts the variable.

Deleting oldest files with shell

I have a folder /var/backup where a cronjob saves a backup of a database/filesystem. It contains a latest.gz.zip and lots of older dumps which are names timestamp.gz.zip.
The folder ist getting bigger and bigger and I would like to create a bash script that does the following:
Keep latest.gz.zip
Keep the youngest 10 files
Delete all other files
Unfortunately, I'm not a good bash scripter so I have no idea where to start. Thanks for your help.
In zsh you can do most of it with expansion flags:
files=(*(.Om))
rm $files[1,-9]
Be careful with this command, you can check what matches were made with:
print -rl -- $files[1,-9]
You should learn to use the find command, possibly with xargs, that is something similar to
find /var/backup -type f -name 'foo' -mtime -20 -delete
or if your find doesn't have -delete:
find /var/backup -type f -name 'foo' -mtime -20 -print0 | xargs -0 rm -f
Of course you'll need to improve a lot, this is just to give ideas.

Moving large number of files [duplicate]

This question already has answers here:
Argument list too long error for rm, cp, mv commands
(31 answers)
Closed 3 years ago.
If I run the command mv folder2/*.* folder, I get "argument list too long" error.
I find some example of ls and rm, dealing with this error, using find folder2 -name "*.*". But I have trouble applying them to mv.
find folder2 -name '*.*' -exec mv {} folder \;
-exec runs any command, {} inserts the filename found, \; marks the end of the exec command.
The other find answers work, but are horribly slow for a large number of files, since they execute one command for each file. A much more efficient approach is either to use + at the end of find, or use xargs:
# Using find ... -exec +
find folder2 -name '*.*' -exec mv --target-directory=folder '{}' +
# Using xargs
find folder2 -name '*.*' | xargs mv --target-directory=folder
find folder2 -name '*.*' -exec mv \{\} /dest/directory/ \;
First, thanks to Karl's answer. I have only minor correction to this.
My scenario:
Millions of folders inside /source/directory, containing subfolders and files inside. Goal is to copy it keeping the same directory structure.
To do that I use such command:
find /source/directory -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -name '*' -exec mv {} /target/directory \;
Here:
-mindepth 1 : makes sure you don't move root folder
-maxdepth 1 : makes sure you search only for first level children. So all it's content is going to be moved too, but you don't need to search for it.
Commands suggested in answers above made result directory structure flat - and it was not what I looked for, so decided to share my approach.
This one-liner command should work for you.
Yes, it is quite slow, but works even with millions of files.
for i in /folder1/*; do mv "$i" /folder2; done
It will move all the files from folder /folder1 to /folder2.
find doesn't work with really long lists of files, it will give you the same error "Argument list too long". Using a combination of ls, grep and xargs worked for me:
$ ls|grep RadF|xargs mv -t ../fd/
It did the trick moving about 50,000 files where mv and find alone failed.

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