UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi guys.

I'm willing to copy a specific file system hierarchy, but I would not like to maintain the directory tree organization.


For example:

Let's say /a/b/c is the fs I'm wanting to copy to my destination,
and that c is a directory with 30 files, 10 on /a/b/c , 10 on a/b/c/c1 and 10 on a/b/c/c2 , I'd like to have all files from inside /a/b/c into my destination, but all of them scattered within a/b/c/ only , not obeying to the source directory tree (I wouldn't, hence, have the directories c1 nor c2, but I would have 30 files)

more clearly, how do I copy a multi-directory structure and have all the resulting files in a single directory destination, with all the files ending in one directory, alone ?


Thanks in advance,
Abrahao.

I believe this is what you're looking for

find /a/b/c -depth -type f -print -exec cp {} /a/b/c/ \;

If you want to empty the sub-directories, use "mv" instead of "cp"

I would recommend copying the files to a directory NOT in the search path. Worst case scenerio, the copy/move will fail because the source and target names are identical.

it seems issuing only
find <file system from where I want the copy to begin> -name <pattern> -exec cp {} <destination_dir> \; worked fine for this purpose.

Thank you all, anyway!