Copying multiple files with same name in the same folder terminal script

Question

I have a lot of files named the same, with a directory structure (simplified) like this:

 ../foo1/bar1/dir/file_1.ps ../foo1/bar2/dir/file_1.ps ../foo2/bar1/dir/file_1.ps .... and many more

As it is extremely inefficient to view all of those ps files by going to the respective directory, I'd like to copy all of them into another directory, but include the name of the first two directories (which are those relevant to my purpose) in the file name.

I have previously tried like this, but I cannot get which file is from where, as they are all named consecutively:

#!/bin/bash -xv cp -v --backup=numbered {} */*/dir/file* ../plots/;

Where ../plots is the folder where I copy them. However, they are now of the form file.ps.~x~ (x is a number) so I get rid of the ".ps.~*~" and leave only the ps extension with:

rename 's/\.ps.~*~//g' *; rename 's/\~/.ps/g' *;

Then, as the ps files have hundreds of points sometimes and take a long time to open, I just transform them into jpg.

for file in * ; do convert -density 150 -quality 70 "$file" "${file/.ps/}".jpg; done;

This is not really a working bash script as I have to change the directory manually.

I guess the best way to do it is to copy the files form the beginning with the names of the first two directories incorporated in the copied filename.

How can I do this last thing?

that other guy · Accepted Answer · 2013-02-14 17:04:56Z

If you just have two levels of directories, you can use

for file in */*/*.ps do ln "$file" "${file//\//_}" done

This goes over each ps file, and hard links them to the current directory with the /s replaced by _. Use cp instead of ln if you intend to edit the files but don't want to update the originals.

For arbitrary directory levels, you can use the bash specific

shopt -s globstar for file in **/*.ps do ln "$file" "${file//\//_}" done

But are you sure you need to copy them all to one directory? You might be able to open them all with yourreader */*/*.ps, which depending on your reader may let browse through them one by one while still seeing the full path.

You probably don't want to open many ps files unless you want your computer to explode.

mtk · Accepted Answer · 2013-02-14 17:00:25Z

You should run a find command and print the names first like

find . -name "file_1.ps" -print

Then iterate over each of them and do a string replacement of / to '-' or any other character like

${filename/\//-}

The general syntax is ${string/substring/replacement}. Then you can copy it to the required directory. The complete script can be written as follows. Haven't tested it (not on linux at the moment), so you might need to tweak the code if you get any syntax error ;)

for filename in `find . -name "file_1.ps" -print` do newFileName=${filename/\//-} cp $filename YourNewDirectory/$newFileName done

You will need to place the script in the same root directory or change the find command to look for the particular directory if you are placing the above script in some other directory.

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