How can I copy all files while excluding files with a certain pattern?

Question

I have the following folder and files:

.
├── photos
│   ├── photo-a
│   │   ├── photo-a.meta.json
│   │   └── photo-a.json
│   ├── photo-b
│   │   ├── photo-b.meta.json
│   │   └── photo-b.json
...
There are more folders and files in the photos folder in the same structure

I would want to copy all the files photo-a.json, photo-b.json and others into another folder called photos-copy. Basically, I want to exclude all the files that end with .meta.json but copy only those that end with .json files.

So, if done correctly, photos-copy folder would look like this:

.
├── photos-copy
│   ├── photo-a.json
│   └── photo-b.json
...

I tried something along cp -a ./photos/*.json ./photos-copy but this will end up copying everything because the .meta.json files also end with .json extensions.

How can I do this?

Answer 1

A couple of options spring to mind.

rsync --dry-run -av --prune-empty-dirs --exclude '*.meta.json' --include '*.json' photos/ photos-copy/

Or if you don't have rsync (and why not!?), this will copy the files retaining the structure

cp -av photos/ photos-copy/
rm -f photos-copy/*/*.meta.json

This variant will flatten the files into a single directory

cp -av photos/*/*.json photos-copy/
rm -f photos-copy/*.meta.json

You can do more fancy things with bash and its extended pattern matching, which here tells the shell to match everything that does not contain .meta in its name:

shopt -s extglob
cp -av photos/*/!(*.meta).json photos-copy/

Answer 2

With rsync: rsync -rv --include="*/" --exclude="*.meta.json" --include "*.json" --exclude="*" ./photos/ photo-copy/

The original directory structure:

photo-a/photo-a.json
photo-a/photo-a.meta.json
photo-b/photo-b.json
photo-b/photo-b.meta.json
photo-b/photo-b.son

Output:

sending incremental file list
photo-a/photo-a.json
photo-b/photo-b.json

I tried it with the previous answer (rsync --dry-run -av --prune-empty-dirs --exclude '*.meta.json' --include '*.json' photos/ photos-copy/) output:

photo-a/photo-a.json
photo-b/
photo-b/photo-b.json
photo-b/photo-b.son

Explanation: In rsync include/exclude the order important. Include all subdirs 1st. Exclude the meta.json, include .json, and exclude any else.