Shell Programming and Scripting

portable and elegant assuming people have cpio, that is. It's not actually a standard anymore.

Thanks all and there're too many solutions.

Sorry for the confusion, Let me clarify again -

1. I need to copy a directory to another location
2. Must keep the same hierarchy and structure etc.
3. All files and directories must be copied incl. hidden files EXCEPT for *.WMV and *.wmv

After posting here, I tried tar chpvf - . -X /tmp/exclude_list | (cd /dest; tar xvf - ) and it worked but needed more tests. I added both *.WMV and *.wmv to /tmp/exclude_list

Any better and more accurate solution is appreciated.

Looks fine - One small thing is you have v (verbose) option on both ends. This will result in jumbled output as both tar commands will be writing to stderr at the same time.

I usually keep v on the extract side only.

Neither cpio nor tar are in the current standards. The standard does include pax. It could be used as follows:

Code:

(cd source_dir;pax -w .) | (cd destination_dir;pax -rvc '*.wmv' '*.WMV')

The v causes pax to list the files as they are being created in the destination directory; drop that character from the options if you want it to copy the hierarchy silently. The pax -c option says to copy all files found in the archive except those with filenames matching the patterns given on the command line (in this case, don't copy files ending in .wmv nor .WMV).