We both needed something before we replied to this thread. I noticed that you hadn't included -type f and then posted a fix that had its own problems. And fixed it, and fixed it again, and fixed it again in a period of about 10 minutes. And, unfortunately, I can't use lack of coffee as an excuse. (I have a caffeine allergy, so I never drink coffee.)

And, I don't think:

Code:

cd /path/to/sourcedir
find . -type d  -exec mkdir -p /path/to/targetdir{} \;
find . -type f ! -name "*.[wW][mM][vV]" -exec cp {} /path/to/targetdir +

does what you were thinking either. The first find does copy the directory hierarchy under sourcedir to targetdir, but the second find still copies all of the non-.wmv files to the targetdir directory; not to their corresponding places in the newly created hierarchy. And, find -exec command + can only be used when there is no more than one {} in the command, and, if there is one, it has to be the last operand in that command.

The OP's desired destination for the copied files seems ambiguous to me. I don't know if the intent is to duplicate the file hierarchy or if the intent is to flatten the file hierarchy into the single directory named as targetdir.

If the intention is to flatten the hierarchy, I still believe:

Code:

cd /path/to/sourcedir
find . -type f ! -name "*.[wW][mM][vV]" -exec cp {} /path/to/targetdir \;

is sufficient.

The the intention is to preserve the hierarchy, I believe we would need something like:

Code:

cd /path/to/sourcedir
find . -type d  -exec mkdir -p /path/to/targetdir{} \;
find . -type f ! -name "*.[wW][mM][vV]" -exec cp {} /path/to/targetdir{} \;

I believe this could be combined into a single find command to avoid walking the tree twice, but with the thousands of invocations of cp the additional complexity might overshadow any performance gain:

Code:

cd /path/to/sourcedir
find . \( -type d  -exec mkdir -p /path/to/targetdir{} \; \) -o \
       \( -type f ! -name '*.[wW][mM][vV]' -exec cp {} /path/to/targetdir{} \; \)

Are we having fun yet???