copying sub-directories not containing a specific file into another directory

Question

I have a directory named dir1 which has about 800 sub-directories named disp-001, disp-002, ... disp-800. I get the list of sub-directories that does not contain a file stdout based on solution given here as

$ find . -type d \! -exec test -e '{}/stdout' \; -print

I would now like to copy the sub-directories that do not contain the file into another directory dir2. I use xargs to accomplish this as

$ find . -type d \! -exec test -e '{}/stdout' \; -print |xargs -I cp -r {} ../dir2

However this throws me an error xargs: {}: No such file or directory

How can I copy these sub-directories to another directory

Answer 1

No need for xargs; find can handle that:

find . -mindepth 1 -type d \! -exec test -e '{}/stdout' \; -exec echo cp -r '{}' ../dir2 \;

or with a modern version of find, \+ will make find do an xargs-like thing (or, the horror, 800 forks!)

• You need -mindepth 1 to exclude the ./ folder which otherwise would copy all the sub-directories.
• The -exec command contains a debug echo option to see the process to be carried out before you perform the copy