find files with particular attributes, rename them to their directory name, copy them elsewhere

Question

It won't look like it, but I've spent 3+ hours trying to figure this out... I am trying to identify files in all subdirectories of a parent directory with particular attributes (name and size) then rename the files to their subdirectory name and copy them to the parent directory. My closest attempt (I think) has been:

find /data/data2/parent/ -size 25166176c -name "o*.nii" -exec cp {} $subdir/o*.nii $subdir.nii \;

To this, I get two lines of: "cp: target '/data/data2/parent/3145_V2.nii' is not a directory" I checked to make sure there is only one file that would meet both attributes, and there is. Also noteworthy, there are two subdirectories under "parent/" with a relevant file that should be picked up by the find command but it only printed the error regarding one of the two, "parent/3145_v2" (and appeared to ignore the other subdirectory).

Answer 1

I have a rule I like to follow--if I spend more than 30 minutes working on constructing a single command in bash, I switch over to python 3.

This problem could be easily solved in python:

#/usr/local/bin/python3

import os, re

DIR_TO_SEARCH = os.getcwd()   #change this to what you want

for (dirpath, dirnames, filenames) in os.walk(DIR_TO_SEARCH):
    if dirpath == DIR_TO_SEARCH:
        # you said you just want subdirectories, so skip this
        continue
    else:
        for name in filenames:
            full_path = dirpath + '/' + name
            #check for the attributes you're looking for. Change this to your needs.
            if re.search(r'o*\.nii', name) or os.path.getsize(full_path) > 0:
                #rename the file to its directory's name, and move it to the parent dir
                print('Moving {} to {}'.format(full_path, dirpath + '.nii'))
                os.rename(full_path, dirpath + '.nii')  

In general, python may be less plug-n-play than bash tools, but it has the advantage of being very well-documented and pretty free from bugs. Just my two cents.

Feel free to use the script above, I tested it and it works fine. Cheers :)