Recursively Copy Files Between Directories – Command Line Guide

command linecopycpmusictransfer

I have all my music in a folder /media/kalenpw/MyBook/Music/ABunchOfOtherFoldersWithFilesInside. I want to copy all of the mp3s to /media/kalenpw/HDD/Music so I used:

cp -R /media/kalenpw/MyBook/Music/*.mp3 /media/kalenpw/HDD/Music

however this only copied the mp3s in the root music folder and did not open any of the artist subdirectories and copy those files.

I was under the impression -R would recursively copy all the files. How can I achieve said goal?

Best Answer

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.

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – How to delete specific files from terminal

If you go one level up, you can do:

~music/artist_a/album1$ cd ..
~music/artist_a$ rm */*.mp3

to delete mp3s from every directory inside the current. If you want to delete only from specific subdirectories:

~music/artist_a$ rm {album1,album2,album4}/*.mp3

You can also use find to delete all mp3 in subfolders of every level

~music/artist_a$ find . -iname '*.mp3' -delete

Use these command with caution.

Ubuntu – Copy files from a directory to a sub-directory (excluding the sub-directory itself)

Assuming you are using bash as your interactive shell, you can enable extglob which allows you to specify "all files except these ones".

shopt -s extglob
cd Parent
cp !(Child1) Child1/

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – How to delete specific files from terminal

Ubuntu – Copy files from a directory to a sub-directory (excluding the sub-directory itself)

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