If your find supports the wholename option, and if your cp supports both --parent and -t then this might do the trick. It works for a small directory that I tested with. (These are two big if's)

Code:

find bin root src -type f ! -wholename bin/bigfile | xargs  cp --parent -t /mnt

It will not copy bigfile only from the bin directory; if it exists in other directories it should be copied.

If you want to test this to see what would be copied, make the following changes which will show the copy command for each source file. The list will be one copy per file to make it easy to read even though the command above will not run one copy per file, but will invoke the cp command once for multiple files.

Code:

find bin root src -type f ! -wholename bin/bigfile | xargs -n 1 echo cp --parent -t /mnt

The output will be something like:

Code:

cp --parent -t  /mnt  bin/foo

The -t specifies the target directory allowing it to be placed at the head of the list making invocation with xargs more efficient, but showing the command this way might be confusing since the normal parameter arrangement is source followed by destination.

Another way to do it would be to use tar. This is my 'go-to' solution for such things. I'm unsure as to whether the --exclude option is recognised by all/most versions of tar. If not you can use -X filename, but that requires creating filename and populating it with a list of files to exclude. Not difficult, but not as simple as the example below:

Code:

tar -cf - bin src root --exclude=bin/bigfile | (cd /mnt; tar -xf )

Alternative with -X

Code:

echo "bin/bigfile" >/tmp/exlist.$$
tar -cf - bin src root -X /tmp/exlist.$$ | (cd /mnt; tar -xf )
rm /tmp/exlist.$$

Hope these get you going.