Extract files with specific file extension and keep directory structure?

Question

I have a lot of .CR2 and .ARW files mixed together in a directory structured by date (2016 has the folder 06 and 07 within it with a folder for each day in them. So a file could be located in 2016/06/03 for example).

I want to extract the .ARW files into a separate folder while keeping the structure. Is this possible?

That is, I want to have two 2016 folders with the same structure but in one, there should only be .ARW files and in one there should only be .CR2 files.

Answer 1

These rsync commands should do what you're looking for

This will do ARW

rsync -arvz --progress --include='*.ARW' --include="*/" --exclude="*" ./source-dir-2016 ./target-ARW-2016

And this will do CR2

rsync -arvz --progress --include='*.CR2' --include="*/" --exclude="*" ./source-dir-2016 ./target-CR2-2016

I used this post for a source of information.

Answer 2

I'll suggest an alternative using find exec and cp --parents

find ./ -name *.ARW -exec cp --parents {} /home/user/target-ARW-dir/ \;
find ./ -name *.CR2 -exec cp --parents {} /home/user/target-CR2-dir/ \;

The limitation of this is that it your working directory has to just above the file structure you want to copy.

---

An idea of what it does:

find find files

./ the directory it will look in

-name *.ARW only list files that end in .ARW

-exec perform commands on the list of files returned

cp --parents copy and maintain the directory structure

{} expands to each of the files find reports, think of it like the x in for x in $files

/home/user/target-ARW-dir/ just an example directory, you should change this to what you actually want

\; proper way to terminate a find -exec so that it acts like a for loop

Answer 3

What about cp recursively the 2016 dir to a 2016_ARW and rm *.CR2 from that, then rm *.ARW from the main.

e.g.

user:~$ ls 2016/06/03/
file_one.ARW file_two.CR2 file_three.CR2 file_four.ARW file_five.ARW
user:~$ cp -R 2016 2016_ARW
user:~$ rm 2016_ARW/06/03/*.CR2
user:~$ rm 2016/06/03/*.ARW
user:~$ ls 2016/06/03/
file_two.CR2 file_three.CR2
user:~$ ls 2016_ARW/06/03/
file_one.ARW file_four.ARW file_five.ARW