I have a folder will a lot of documents (pdf, xls, doc etc.) which users have uploaded but only 20% of them are currently linking from my html files. So my goal is to copy only the files which are linked in my html files from my Document directory into another directory.

Eg: My documents exist in /web/Documents (with sub-folders) and my html files exist in /web/html

My users were kind to me and made sure that they did both absolute linking and relative linking meaning they used <a href="Documents/***.doc"> and <a href="http://xxx.com/Documents/***.doc">

And of course not everyone was case-sensitive when linking.

Can someone help me in figuring out how do I accomplish this.

Thanks in advance.

---------- Post updated at 02:11 PM ---------- Previous update was at 12:22 PM ----------

I am able to get a huge list of all the links (irrelevant of whether they are within the domain or not) by using

perl -nle 'print " $&" if /(?<=href=")[^">]+/' *.html

This gives me a list of all my links within the folder.
eg:
Documents/....
mailto:
external website links
xxxx.html (other html documents within the domain)


How do I go further from here...

Welcome to the forum.
1. Please post few lines from the HTML file.. lines containing both absolute linking and relative linking (preferably covering all possibilities that needs to be parsed)
2. And please use code tags for codes and data samples.

Here are the examples of links in a html file. I have changed the webpage names and wordings but to give you a jist of what it would look like

Possible cases for documents are pdf, doc, docx, ppt, pptx, xls, xlsx, jpg. I want to be able to copy any of the above files into a separate directory (retaining the folder structure)

Absolute linking

<a href="http://mywebsite.com/Documents/comm_ed/regform.pdf">

<a href="Documents/PDF/handbook.pdf" target="_blank">
<a href-"Documents/htb/1112.doc" title="test" target="_blank">
<a href="Documents/life/2011-12 HANDBOOK.pdf">
<a href="documents/science/oral06R2.pdf">
<a href="Documents/arts&amp;letters/F 11 FINAL.doc">
<a href="documents/b_office/Office%20Change%20Request.doc">
<a href="../../html/Documents/htb/211_diverse.xls">

<a href="http://yahoo.com">

<a href="mailto:webmaster@mywebsite.com">

<a href="anotherpage.html">

#! /bin/bash
while IFS='"' read a file c
do
    echo $file | grep -qi 'documents'
    [ $? -ne 0 ] && continue
    file=`echo $file | sed 's/.*\(documents\/.*\)/\1/i'`
    mkdir -p copy/`dirname $file`
    cp $file copy/$file
done < inputfile.xml

Thank you. It's creating the directories but not copying the files.

---------- Post updated at 11:55 AM ---------- Previous update was at 11:16 AM ----------

I guess it helps if I give the error message

cp: cannot stat `Documents/htb/able%20Pop%20Blocker.pdf': No such file or directory

My deduction is that the %20 should be a space. If I manually copy it I would be doing something like
Documents/htb/able\ Pop\ Blocker.pdf

So how do I replace the %20 with \(space)

sed -i 's/%20/ /g' file.html