Copying a files from a filter list and creating their associated parent directories

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hello all,

I'm trying to copy all files within a specified directory to another location based on a find filter of mtime -1 (Solaris OS). The issue that I'm having is that in the destination directory, I want to retain the source directory structure while copying over only the files that have been modified within 24 hours (so cp -r option is out).

For example, if I've got the following directory structure as my source

/datafiles
/datafiles/a/a1.txt (mod 12 hours ago) 
/datafiles/a/a2.txt (mod 36 hours ago)
/datafiles/b/b1.txt (mod 36 hours ago)
/datafiles/b/b2.txt (mod 12 hours ago)

And my target is /modfiles, then after the copy I would want the following:

/modfiles/datafiles/a/a1.txt
/modfiles/datafiles/b/b2.txt

I'm trying:

find /datafiles -mtime -1 -exec cp '{}' /modfiles \;

I'm trying to avoid having to use TAR for this to maintain the directory structure but it's starting to look like my only option. Any ideas?

Thanks!

2

I was not sure of this , how ever googled and end up in the link:

How do I selectively copy files from a directory structure? :: Free Tech Support :: Ask Dave Taylor!

So , you can modify your "find" command something like this:

 
find /datafiles -mtime -1  | cpio -pavd DESTINATION_DIRECTORY

Let me know , if it worked out!

3

That's a great solution, so long as he has cpio and none of the filenames contain a newline (usually a sane assumption ;)).

If the OP has cpio but needs to handle filenames with a newline, some implementations of cpio support a -0 option which can be used in conjunction with find's -print0.

Regards,
Alister

4

This solution does work in regular shells unfortunately the shell I'm using is a custom one from a product that is based on UNIX but does not have the CPIO command which is very unfortunate.
Thank you for the response...I think I may have to look into some alternatives.

5

Just a quick update on my progress...it seems that the pax utility does the trick so far for what I need:

pax -rw -u -T 0000 -p am /datafiles /modfiles

This seems to copy all files that were modified within 1 day from /datafiles to /modfiles directory and does not preserve mod time (which is what I need).

It also seems to copy over the parent directory structures of the files which is great. Now for some further testing...