Copy subfolders containing at least n files

Question

I have a folder root_folder containing a lot of subfolders. Each of these subfolders contains a small number of files (between 1 and 20) and I want to copy all the subfolders containing at least 5 files into another folder new_folder. I have found how to print the folders that interest me: https://superuser.com/questions/617050/find-directories-containing-a-certain-number-of-files but not how to copy them.

Answer 1

You can do a for loop on the find result and copy the folder with -R :

IFS=$'\n'
for source_folder in "$(find . -maxdepth 1 -type d -exec bash -c "echo -ne '{}\t'; ls '{}' | wc -l" \; |  
awk -F"\t" '$NF>=5{print $1}');" do 
  if [[ "$source_folder" != "." ]]; then 
    cp -R "$source_folder" /destination/folder
  fi
done

Answer 2

Below script works for your case :

find . -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type d -print0 | while read -rd '' line
do  files=("$line"/* "$line"/.*)
count=${#files[@]};((count-=2))
if [ $count -ge 5 ]
then
cp -R "$line" ../newfolder/
fi
done

Note : This should be executed from the base folder as I am using relative paths.

Answer 3

Iterating over the subdirectories of a directory:

for subdir in root_folder/*/; do
  if [ -L "${subdir%/}" ]; then continue; fi
  …
done

The if [ -L … line skips symbolic links to directories. Omit it if you want to include symbolic links to directories or if you know there won't be any.

Directories whose name begins with a . (dot directories) won't be included. To include them, in bash, run shopt -s dotglob.

To count the number of files in a directory, in bash, store them in an array and count the number of elements. Run shopt -s nullglob to get 0 for an empty directory (otherwise the glob pattern * remains unexpanded if it matches nothing, so you get 1 instead of 0).

Thus:

#!/bin/bash
shopt -s nullglob dotglob
for subdir in root_folder/*/; do
  if [ -L "${subdir%/}" ]; then continue; fi
  files=("$subdir"/*)
  if ((${#files[@]} >= 5)); then
    cp -Rp "$subdir" new_folder/
  fi
done