cp: silence "omitting directory" warning

Question

I'm using the command cp ./* "backup_$timestamp" in a bash script to backup all files in directory into a backup folder in a subdirectory. This works fine, but the script keeps outputting warning messages:

cp: omitting directory `./backup_1364935268'

How do I tell cp to shut up without silencing any other warnings that I might want to know about?

Answer 1

Probably you want to use cp -r in that script. That would copy the source recursively including directories. Directories will get copied and the messages will disappear.

---

If you don't want to copy directories you can do the following:

• redirect stderr to stdout using 2>&1
• pipe the output to grep -v

script 2>&1 | grep -v 'omitting directory' 

quote from grep man page:

  -v, --invert-match

          Invert the sense of matching, to select non-matching lines.

Answer 2

The solution that works for me is the following:

find -maxdepth 1 -type f -exec cp {} backup_1364935268/ \;

It copies all (including these starting with a dot) files from the current directory, does not touch directories and does not complain about it.