ubuntu directory file-copy – How to Copy-Merge Two Directories

directoryfile-copyUbuntu

I have two directories images and images2 with this structure in Linux:

/images/ad  
/images/fe  
/images/foo

… and other 4000 folders

and the other is like: 

/images2/ad  
/images2/fe  
/images2/foo

… and other 4000 folders

Each of these folders contain images and the directories' names under images and images2 are exactly the same, however their content is different. Then I want to know how I can copy-merge the images of /images2/ad into images/ad, the images of /images2/foo into images/foo and so on with all the 4000 folders..

Best Answer

This is a job for rsync. There's no benefit to doing this manually with a shell loop unless you want to move the file rather than copy them.

rsync -a /path/to/source/ /path/to/destination

In your case:

rsync -a /images2/ /images/

(Note trailing slash on images2, otherwise it would copy to /images/images2.)

If images with the same name exist in both directories, the command above will overwrite /images/SOMEPATH/SOMEFILE with /images2/SOMEPATH/SOMEFILE. If you want to replace only older files, add the option -u. If you want to always keep the version in /images, add the option --ignore-existing.

If you want to move the files from /images2, with rsync, you can pass the option --remove-source-files. Then rsync copies all the files in turn, and removes each file when it's done. This is a lot slower than moving if the source and destination directories are on the same filesystem.

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