How to copy files that have same name as the folder they are in?

papabiceps

11/19/23, 6:51 PM

There are files that have a pattern like name/name.ext inside subdirectories. There are many files with the same extension inside the subdirectories but I want to copy only the files which have pattern mentioned. what is the command to achieve this?

2 + 0

copy

20.04

Score:2

Ubuntu

steeldriver

11/19/23, 7:23 PM

There may be a clever way to do this using a shell like zsh that has more extensive filename generation (globbing) capabilities, but if you can't do that, then the GNU find command supports regular expression matching with backreferences for at least some of the regextypes. Ex. given

$ tree .
.
├── bar
│   ├── 1.xyz
│   ├── 2.xyz
│   └── 3.xyz
├── baz
│   ├── 1.xyz
│   ├── 2.xyz
│   ├── 3.xyz
│   └── baz.xyz
└── foo
    ├── 1.xyz
    ├── 2.xyz
    ├── 3.xyz
    └── foo.xyz

3 directories, 11 files

then

$ find . -regextype posix-extended -regex '.*/([^/]+)/\1\.xyz$'
./baz/baz.xyz
./foo/foo.xyz

which you can modify to copy like

find . -regextype posix-extended -regex '.*/([^/]+)/\1\.xyz$' -exec cp -n -t path/to/newdir/ {} +

+ 0

Score:0

Ubuntu

jtalics

11/19/23, 7:07 PM

The following will copy ./name/name.txt to . (your currernt directory)

cp name/name.txt .

+ 1

papabiceps

11/19/23, 7:08 PM

name/name.ext is a pattern. `name` can be anything. its a placeholder.

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