cp Command – cp Recursive with Specific File Extension

You don't specify in your question if it is a requirement to preserve the directory structure in the copy or if you just need a copy of the files. To simply copy all the files not named *.data you could use this:

find . -type f ! -name '*.data' | xargs cp -t ../destination_dir/

On the other hand if you want to preserve the directory structure you could use something like this:

for file in `find . ! -name '*.txt' | sed 's/^.\///'`; do if [ -d "./$file" ]; then mkdir -p "../destination_dir/$file"; else cp "./$file" "../destination_dir/$file"; fi; done

Not sure if there is a simpler way to do this but this command does the following:

Find all files and folders in the current directory or it's subfolders not matching *.data then for each:

Test if the file is a directory if it is make a matching directory under destination dir, or if it is a file it copies it to the destination instead.

Edit: Adding shell script version:

#!/bin/bash

# Disable shell glob expansion within the script
# Required to stop bash from expndinging the glob in $1
set -f

for file in `find . ! -name $1 | sed 's/^.\///'`
  do if [ -d "./$file" ]; then
    mkdir -p "$2/$file"
  else
    cp "./$file" "$2/$file"
fi
done

Use:

find /media/kalenpw/MyBook/Music/ -name '*.mp3' -exec cp {} /media/kalenpw/HDD/Music \;

The reason for your command not working is that names containing wildcards (*.mp3) are expanded before the command is run, so if you had three files (01.mp3, 02.mp3, 03.mp3) your effective command was:

cp -R /media/kalenpw/MyBook/Music/01.mp3 /media/kalenpw/MyBook/Music/02.mp3 /media/kalenpw/MyBook/Music/03.mp3 /media/kalenpw/HDD/Music

As you can see -R has no effect in this case.