UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi all,
I want to copy a directory named Ec1 to another directory named Ec2, newly created. But Ec1 has a bunch of *.dat files and many many other kinds of files. Whle creating Ec2, I selectively want to omit the *.dat files since they are huge files of the order of 100 MBs and there are hundreds of such files which would consume a lot of time.

How can I use the 'cp -r' command to selectively omit the *.dat files in Ec1 and obtain the Ec2 directory without any *.dat files while copying the directory Ec1.

Any suggestions are appreciated.

Thanks,
Sai.

It's easier not to use, cp -r

Code:

cd /the/path/to/EC1
find . depth ! -name "*.dat" | cpio -pdmv /the/path/to/EC2

You are a genius reborg!

This is what I did, and it worked.
cd Ec1/
find . -depth ! -name "*.dat" | cpio -pdmv ../Ec2

In the first part, I am guessing that you are finding all the files without a *.dat and then you are piping the output into Ec2. Just curious, what do the cpio and -pdmv do?

Thanks a lot,
Sai.

-p pass trough (copy in and out)
-d make dirs
-m preserve modification time
-v verbose

from the man page:

Code:

       ....cpio copies files
       into or out of a cpio or tar archive, which is a  file  that  contains
       other  files  plus  information  about  them, such as their file name,
       owner, timestamps, and access permissions.  The archive can be another
       file  on the disk, a magnetic tape, or a pipe.

Hi It was very excellent .... made my job easy.

I have another question ....
Dir1 I have some files *.dat
Dir2 I have script to run .... I would like to pass the all *.dat files to the script in dir2 without path ( only the file names) ... can anyone help me in this

Thanks in advance

Madan

cd /Dir1
cp -p *.dat /Dir2/