Shell – CLI equivalent of Gnome’s recent files feature

Assuming you have your desired files in a text file, you could do something like

while IFS= read -r file; do 
    echo mkdir -p ${file%/*}; 
    cp /source/"$file" /target/${file%/*}/${file##*/}; 
done < files.txt 

That will read each line of your list, extract the directory and the file name, create the directory and copy the file. You will need to change source and target to the actual parent directories you are using. For example, to copy /foo/a/a.txt to /bar/a/a.txt, change source to foo and target to bar.

I can't tell from your question whether you want to copy all directories and then only specific files or if you just want the directories that will contain files. The solution above will only create the necessary directories. If you want to create all of them, use

find /source -type d -exec mkdir -p {} /target

That will create the directories. Once those are there, just copy the files:

while IFS= read -r file; do 
    cp /source/"$file" /target/"$file"
done

Update

This little script will move all the files modified after September 8. It assumes the GNU versions of find and touch. Assuming you're using Linux, that's what you will have.

#!/usr/bin/env bash    

## Create a file to compare against.
tmp=$(mktemp)
touch -d "September 8" "$tmp"

## Define the source and target parent directories
source=/path/to/source
target=/path/to/target

## move to the source directory
cd "$source"

## Find the files that were modified more recently than $tmp and copy them
find ./ -type f -newer "$tmp" -printf "%h %p\0" | 
    while IFS= read -rd '' path file; do
        mkdir -p "$target"/"$path"
        cp "$file" "$target"/"$path"
    done

Strictly speaking, you don't need the tmp file. However, this way, the same script will work tomorrow. Otherwise, if you use find's -mtime, you would have to calculate the right date every day.

Another approach would be to first find the directories, create them in the target and then copy the files:

1. Create all directories

    find ./ -type d -exec mkdir -p ../bar/{} \;
   

2. Find and copy the relevant files

    find ./ -type f -newer "$tmp" -exec cp {} /path/to/target/bar/{} \;
   

3. Remove any empty directories

    find ../bar/ -type d -exec rmdir {} \;
   

At least the GNU and FreeBSD finds have the -ls action, which produces output similar to ls:

$ find . -ls
   392815      4 drwxr-xr-x   2 user  group      4096 Jul 22 18:39 .
   392816      0 -rw-r--r--   1 user  group         0 Jul 22 18:39 ./foo.txt
   392818      0 -rw-r--r--   1 user  group         0 Jul 22 18:39 ./bar.txt

GNU find also has very configurable output in the form of the -printf action.

That said, I do wonder what makes your ls so slow. Both find and ls need to read the whole directory and call lstat() on all the files to find the dates, so there shouldn't be much of a difference. ls does need to sort the whole list of files, so that could make a difference if there is a really large number of files. In that case, you might want to consider spreading the files out to different directories, possibly based on their date. Dropping the -r and use head instead of tail might help.