Recursive copy to relative destination paths

Question

I was thinking something like what I'm trying to accomplish could be done with built in shell tools w/o the need for a more complicated script.

I'd like to find all the files in a path and copy them to a destination basepath retaining the relative paths they were found in.

Example:

Say I ran:

[~:] find /path/src  \( -name "*.jpg" -o -name "*.gif" \) 

and that returned:

/path/src/a.jpg
/path/src/dir1/b.jpg
/path/src/dir2/dir3/c.gif

I'd like them to all end up in:

/path/dest/a.jpg
/path/dest/dir1/b.jpg
/path/dest/dir2/dir3/c.gif

I tried an -exec cp {} /path/dest \; flag to find but that just dumped everything in /path/dest. E.g:

/path/dest/a.jpg
/path/dest/b.jpg
/path/dest/c.gif

Answer 1

Actually it also works with cp, what you want is the --parents flag.

cp --parents `find /path/src  \( -name "*.jpg" -o -name "*.gif" \)` /path/target

In theory -P is synonyms with --parents, but that never worked for me.

Answer 2

You can use rsync for this, e.g.

$ rsync -avm /path/src/ /path/dest/ --include \*/ --include \*.jpg --include \*.gif --exclude \*

Just to clarify the above:

-avm             # recursive, copy attributes etc, verbose, skip empty directories
/path/src/       # source
/path/dest/      # destination (NB: trailing / is important)
--include \*/    # include all directories
--include \*.jpg # include files ending .jpg
--include \*.gif # include files ending .gif
--exclude \*     # exclude all other files