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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

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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
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  • They are directories so I added -r after cp. It prints the correct output but the copy does not seem to happen. Can you verify if it works for you? – rambalachandran Sep 22 '15 at 15:27
  • There's a debugging echo, which is handy to verify in advance how you're about to destroy your filesystem. – thrig Sep 22 '15 at 15:30
  • My bad. There is an issue, since the output also produces the folder ./ which means it will perform cp -r ./ ../dir2 which in turn will copy all the sub-folders irrespective of presence of the file – rambalachandran Sep 22 '15 at 15:35
  • -mindepth 1 should exclude ./ – thrig Sep 22 '15 at 16:01
  • Great that works. – rambalachandran Sep 22 '15 at 16:12

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