UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hello,

I have been trying all sorts of combinations and been royally screwing up my filesystem in the process I have a bunch of .wav files in a hierarchical album/artist etc folder structure and each has a duplicate .w4a file next to it.

All I want to do is move all the .w4a files to somewhere else, complete with the hierarchical folder structure, whilst leaving the .wavs where they are. I figured the following would work at the top level of the folder structure:

mv -r *.w4a ~/blah/blah/newplace/

Obviously i need to spend less time outside and more on the command line because this doesn't work

Sing your praises, I would.

Many thanks,
L

What I would do is copy the top level of the heirarchical file structure i.e.

Code:

cp -r /toplevel ~/blah/blah/newplace/

cd ~/blah/blah/newplace/

find . -type f -name "*.wav" -exec rm -f {} \;

Of course make sure you have enough room for the initial copy of all the .wav and .w4a files.

Maybe someone else has a cleaner solution?

Thanks for the suggestion, but I don't have the luxury of all that space.

I am trying to move just the compressed files from a large capacity external firewire drive to a laptop

He said MOVE not RE-move!!! hehe...

There is no -r (recursive) option for mv that I know of... must use cp.

# This will recursively copy all the *.w4a files and directories to the new targetdir. then you must remove them... Be sure to start at the root of the filesystem. You might have to create the targetdir...

cp -r *.w4a targetdir

Thanks, but sadly, I've already tried this.

cp -r *.w4a ~/blah/blah/someplace/

comes back with this:

cp: *.m4a: No such file or directory

The above command will only move any .w4a files in the current directory, it does not go down recursively -

Try the full path instead.

or if that fails.

try cp -r . ~/to/some/dir.

Here is a good link. http://www.brandonhutchinson.com/Copy_directories.html


try this...
# cd fromdir; tar cf - . | (cd todir; tar xfp ###I think you can change the dot to *.w4a

There was a command line that I remembered using cpio that I cant remember...

Kelam I think this is what you meant...

Code:

find . -depth  | cpio -pdmv /path/tobe/copied/to

but combining that with -name gives

Code:

find . -depth -name "*.w4a" | cpio -pdmv /path/tobe/copied/to

and that should do what the original post asked for.