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On the UNIX bash shell (specifically Mac OS X Leopard) what would be the simplest way to copy every file having a specific extension from a folder hierarchy (including subdirectories) to the same destination folder (without subfolders)?
Obviously there is the problem of having duplicates in the source hierarchy. I wouldn't mind if they are overwritten.
Example: I need to copy every .txt file in the following hierarchy
/foo/a.txt /foo/x.jpg /foo/bar/a.txt /foo/bar/c.jpg /foo/bar/b.txt To a folder named 'dest' and get:
/dest/a.txt /dest/b.txt 
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There's no reason to use special tools or even scripting. Just use the search function in Explorer. Open the folder you wish to flatten in Explorer. Create a new folder, select all files (but not folders), and drag them to that folder (This will avoid getting two copies of those files.)
In order to copy a directory on Linux, you have to execute the “cp” command with the “-R” option for recursive and specify the source and destination directories to be copied.
Flattening a folder means moving all the files from their various subfolders into one parent folder. You may want to do this to ease archiving, or to rearrange files that are stored in subfolders on a daily basis into a monthly wrap-up folder, for instance.
In bash:
find /foo -iname '*.txt' -exec cp \{\} /dest/ \; find will find all the files under the path /foo matching the wildcard *.txt, case insensitively (That's what -iname means). For each file, find will execute cp {} /dest/, with the found file in place of {}.
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