UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi again All

After posting my first thread just a few eeks ago and having such a great response (Thank You once again ), I thought I'd perhaps ask the experts again. In short I'm trying to achieve a "find" and "copy" where the find needs to find directories:

Code:

find -d -name outbox

and the copy needs to place a "master" file to these found "outboxes" below the "master" outbox.

I've tried a few variations of:

Code:

find -d -name "outbox" -exec cp $OUTBOX "{}" \;

OR

Code:

find -d -name outbox | while read file; do cp $OUTBOX $file ;done

These though are not working .. Any ideas how I can effectively copy what's in my "master" outbox to multiple outboxes further down the file tree? Currently I have my script running with absolute paths, but as the folder names between the master outbox and other outboxes can change I'd like to find a clever way of "searching" for outboxes and then copying to them - sound possible?

Thanks in advance and have a super day further.

Regards
Dean

You are welcome, although I would really appreciate if you ran the simple test commands I suggested there https://www.unix.com/unix-dummies-que...#post302348379 to figure out what is happening or not on your system. Try this:

Code:

find . -type d -name outbox -exec cp "$OUTBOX" {} \;

By the way, quoting the curly braces is probably unnecessary (despite what an urban legend might suggest) but quoting $OUTBOX might be

Brilliant .. that now worked ... hummm, not sure why I was battling then. The -type must be the answer and not -d ... Thanks again.

Regarding the other post, yip it works with the "{}" and NOT without them so I'm as confused as you are? Without the quotes it seems to delete only the first filename within the list given to the command, but when it's in quotes they all get deleted as needed.

Will run the test commands and post my results

Regards
Dean

---------- Post updated at 04:34 PM ---------- Previous update was at 04:05 PM ----------

sorry to bug you again, but wow I didn't see there were so many posts on the last thread (I didn't get any mails so stopped looking at the thread) .. gosh, sounds like quite a debate was going on .. All in good spirits I hope ... What can I try run for you? I see many examples of code in the thread but, you made mention of a specific script you'd like me to try, which was that? I'll run and post my results ASAP

Regards
Dean

There are indeed a lot of postings there but the URL I linked to is directly pointing to post #19 where I was asking for three commands to be run on your machine.

Ok, so now I'm really concerned .. this worked? It finds the "test" file WITHOUT the quotes? But why when I'm using the $DELETE file with a list of files to delete it didn't work ... could the fact that it's a list be making any difference? I wouldn't think so .... wow, confusing I'll see if my script works without quotes and see if it works with multiple files from the $DELETE list. Will post back soon.

Thanks, please post your code and the results to help understanding what you are observing.

Please do, we are all interested in this one.

To confirm which O/S you have, please could you post the output from this enquiry:

Code:

uname -a