Ubuntu – Copy large number of files of specific date to another directory

cpfindgrep

I've around 11K log files of specific date let say 26Feb inside one directory(there are other date data also). To copy only 26th Feb log files to destination from linux command line, I use below commands.

[root@achal logs]# ls -lrt | grep "Feb 26" | wc -l
11142

and

[root@achal logs]# find . -type f -newermt 'Feb 26' -exec cp {} 26Feb_UE_HISTORY/ \;

But it copies other date files also, not only 26th Feb files.

Any help is appreciated.

Best Answer

Your selection finds all files newer than Feb 26. So you have to exclude the files modified after Feb 26:

find . -type f -newermt 'Feb 26' ! -newermt 'Feb 27' -exec cp {} 26Feb_UE_HISTORY/ \;

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Ubuntu – How to copy large number of small files to a NTFS external drive

Maybe you can move them to tape archive (*.tar) and copy the archive to another drive then. It could possibly help you.

Compress:

 tar -cvf my-new-archive.tar dir-with-files-to-add/*

Decompress:

 tar -xf my-new-archive.tar dir-for-extract-files/*

Ubuntu – copy files by date

Using find, the files (and only the files) modified in the last day are found by:

find . -type f -mtime 1

so you can copy them with

find . -type f -mtime 1  -exec cp {} bak/ \;

Meaning: find all entities under the current directory (.), of type "file" (-type f), modified at least 1 day from now (-mtime 1, but it's subtle, follow the link to learn more), and for each one of them execute the command cp followed by the name of the file that match the previous conditions and by a literal bak/ --- in the exec clause, the closing semicolon (escaped to avoid the shell eating it) closes the command and additionally means that the command is to be executed once for every match.

Notice that the directory tree will be flattened in the bak/ folder, so maybe using an archive format would be better.

For example, this is my script that makes a backup of all files in my working directories modified today and since two days in tar files and then move them to my Dropbox directory:

#! /bin/zsh 
#
cd $HOME
today="today-$(hostname)".tar
twodays="twodays-$(hostname)".tar
mydirs=(bin Documents Templates texmf Desktop) # list your top-level working dirs here  
rm -f $today $twodays
echo -n "Starting today and twodays backups... " 
find $mydirs -type f -mtime -1 -exec tar rf $today {} +
find $mydirs -type f -mtime -2 -exec tar rf $twodays {} +
echo "backups done:" 
ls -lh $today $twodays
echo "Moving to Dropbox" 
mv $today $twodays $HOME/Dropbox
sleep 2
dropbox status

it needs zsh because I'm lazy and didn't try to adapt to the array structure of bash, but surely someone here can do that (hint, hint)...

Best Answer

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Ubuntu – copy files by date

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