UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

First I'm new to Linux and have used the find command pretty often but this is where I've hit a snag. I have a file that contains 3500 files that I want to find and then eventually copy to my own directory (these files are all on a shared directory at work atm).

Our work computer are huge and contain large amounts of files and because they are all under numerous directories and sub-directories I wanted to somehow give a loop to make it faster for find to look within the directory I know the file is in (but not necessary which sub-directory). Does that make sense?

Is there an easy way to do that?

Thanks!

Hello Myrona,

The find command is still probably the one you are after. How much information do you know about your targets, or do you just have a list of file names?

Can you tell us which version of Linux you have:-

Code:

uname -a

Differences exist in the various suppliers and versions of Unix (or Linux) so it's important to know what features are available to you so you can get good advice on exploiting them.


At the worst, you could even do:-

Code:

find directory -print | grep -f listfile

.... but there are probably smarters ways available.



Robin

With 3500 files:

Code:

find directory -print | grep -f listfile

listfile is likely to contain some filenames that are subsets of other filenames and could easily have filenames that could appear as a subset of a directory name rather than being the entire name of the final component of a pathname (so the grep could yield false positives).

If the intent is to eventually copy 3500 files from one directory hierarchy to another directory, we also need to know if you intend to put all of those files in a single directory, duplicate the directory structure of the source hierarchy in the destination hierarchy, or create some other directory structure in the destination. (Putting 3500 regular files in a single directory is usually not a good idea.) You could modify listfile to use BREs to look for a / followed by the name and anchor to the end of a line, but if any of your filenames contain BRE special characters (such as period, asterisk,question mark, etc.), you'll have other problems

A simple awk script can read the output of find, match the file names in your list of files against the final component of the pathnames find listed, and print the source pathnames; but I'd need to know more about what destination file hierarchy you want to create before I'd suggest a solution for this project.