I have been toying around with a script that will copy all files altered in a development directory over to a testing directory and have been trying to construct the command to meet my needs.

Basically I am using find in a directory to see what files have changed over the past 24 hours. Then if I find any files that have changed I want to copy it over to another directory maintaining permissions. I have been toying with both these commands.

cd /home/common-dev
find . -mtime -1 |xargs cp -p {} ../common

I am getting errors about files not being directories so i must have something off with my cp command or how I am understanding how xargs is passing the filename.

cd /home/common-dev
find . -mtime -1 | cpio -opmvd ../common

The cpio command is not retaining permissions but it is doing the copies great.

Any suggestions or enlightenment would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Do you want to copy directories - it is not needed if they already exist....

Thank you, I ended up doing something like this.


I have been experimenting further, what if I needed to check for directories or found a new file in a subdirectory that did not exist outside my development directory. I tried dropping the type -f from the find but I keep getting weird results. At one point I had it putting everythign where it needed to be, but an additional copy of each file was also copied to the base directory of my source directory. Somehow I thought when I first decided on this that it would be a little easier.

find . -mtime -1 -depth -print | cpio -pdmuv ../common

The -o and -p option don't go together.


By using the -depth option the directories will have to same time stamp as the original directory. Basically in this way the directory is copied after the files below it. (Ofcourse the directory is created before, but permissions and access rights, time stamps are copied after).

When doing it the other way around, copying the file will result in the timestamps of the directory to be changed.

That is excellent, The -depth on the find command and the straightening out of the cpio flags seemed to be what was causing my problems. Thanks for the response!