Shell Programming and Scripting

I am new to unix so this is probably a pretty basic question.

I am trying to write several commands on one line that creates a directory called bf in the current directory, then copy all files within that directory and any subdirectories, that do not start with the letter c to the new bf folder.
When it copies the files in the sub directory it must also copy the folder, but copying only the files within it that dont start with c.

so far ive got this which copies everything but im not really sure what to do from here...

Code:

mkdir bf | cp -r * bf

thanks

Code:

 
mkdir bf && cp -rf * bf/ && find . -type f -name "c*" -exec rm {} \;

copying all the files to bf directory, then delete the files which starts with c

thanks for your help.

this gives an error - cp: cannot copy a directory, 'bf', into itself, 'bf/bf' and the command puts a folder bf in the newly created bf folder.

what needs changing?

dont create the bf directory in the same directory.
create it some where.. once the copy is completed, move it to your necessary location

Code:

 
mkdir /tmp/bf && cp -rf * /tmp/bf/ && find . -type f -name "c*" -exec rm {} \;

make a bash script of everything

Code:

#vi a.sh 

#!/bin/bash
NEW_BF="/new_bf"
BF="/bf"
mkdir "${NEW_BF}"
cp -pr ${BF}/* ${NEW_BF}
cd  ${NEW_BF}
find . -type f -name c* -exec rm {} \;

The professional approach is to use "cpio" not "cp -r". It will preserve permissions and create subdirectories as required.

Code:

mkdir bf
find . -type f ! -name c\* -print | cpio -pdumv bf

The use of ! to mean "not" is described in "man find".

The combination of "find" and "cpio" is described in the "man" pages for both commands.

As others have realised, this command will only work while the subdirectory "bf" is empty. If you run the command a second time it will of course find files in the subdirectory "bf".