I would like to do a backup where I recursively go through a dir structure and only get directories with files whose names matching a particular regexp. I would like to keep the directory structure, so that if there is a match at
~/dir1/dir2/regexpmatch.txt
it creates the same dir structure in the target and the file is copied over to
/media/backup/dir1/dir2/regexpmatch.txt
preferably with rsync, but if that is not possible another program would do.
How about combining find with tar? An example to find all .c files:
find . -type f -name '*.c' -print | tar zcf backup.tar.gz -T - You should combine find and rsync commands this way:
find . -regex .*X | rsync --files-from=- ./ b/ Example of usage:
$ find b/ b/ b/a b/a/dX b/a/cX $ find a/ a/ a/dX a/cX a/b $ rm -rf b $ find . -regex .*X | rsync --files-from=- ./ b/ $ find b/ b/ b/a b/a/dX b/a/cX Here I copy only that files that are conform to the regular expression .*X.
From the rsync man page:
Here s an example that copies all .pdf files in a hierarchy, only creating the necessary destination directories to hold the .pdf files, and ensures that any superfluous files and directories in the destination are removed (note the hide filter of non-directories being used instead of an exclude): rsync -avm --del --include= *.pdf -f hide,! */ src/ dest If you didn t want to remove superfluous destination files, the more time- honored options of "--include= */ --exclude= * " would work fine in place of the hide-filter (if that is more natural to you). 