How to copy target files using symlinks and a list of file names

Question

I would like to copy many files. I have their location as a set of symbolic links whose names are stored as lines in a txt file. So I am using cp and need to combine the readlink and cat/pipe functions. I haven't seen other questions deal with this combination.

The command:

cp $(readlink < /path/list.txt) -t /path/targetdir

A simpler example works where the symlink names are used explicitly in the argument of the readlink (but I have too many file names to do this manually), e.g.:

cp $(readlink symlink1 symlink2) -t /path/targetdir

The issue is in how I am combining the 'readlink' and the pipe, but I can't figure out what.

EDIT: here's an example of what's in the first lines of the list.txt file:

symlink_13243

symlink_39184

symlink_83204

each row is a unique symlink name.

Answer 1

Using GNU xargs and readlink:

</path/list.txt xargs -d'\n' readlink -z | xargs -0 cp -t /path/targetdir

With one symbolic link per line in list.txt, choose newline (\n) as delimiter for the first xargs and pipe readlink's output to another xargs, this time using a null character to terminate the paths (-z and -0).

Answer 2

It worked by using a loop and cp -L instead of readlink. I ran the following command in the folder that contained the symlinks:

for item in $(cat /path/dir/list.txt); do cp -L $item /path/targetdir; done

also I had encoding issues with the txt file (related to building it in R but on a Windows machine).