copying files from multiple specefic parent directories

Question

I would like to copy files from the current directory which are divided into different subdirectories. The files I want to copy should only have True and False as their parents. True directory files should be copied in dst/report/1/ and False directory files should be in dst/report/2/.

I haven't been able to figure out how to automate the copying process:

• I thought I could use the find . -maxdepth digit but I don't know what the exact depth is.

• The files should only be *.txt files, and even though some names may be duplicated, their contents are different, so I need either of them in the destination folder, but cp would overwrite them.

• True and False intermediate parent directories could exist, but my intended files are generated in the last parent directory.

• In addition, directory space is about 200GiB, so it takes a while to search through it.

• I'm not sure about escape characters in directory and files so I don't really want to break the copying process.

sample working space:

```
__ current dir
  |__ path_1
        |__ True
              |__ 00000.txt
              |__ 020.txt
  |__ p_x
        |__ 100
              |__ True
                    |__ 00000.txt
                    |__ 020.txt
                    |__ 10.txt
              |__ False
                    |__ 1.txt
                    |__ 2.txt
                    |__ 200.txt
        |__ x
              |__ True
                    |__ 00000.txt
                    |__ 020.txt
              |__ False
                    |__ 1.txt
                    |__ 2.txt
        |__ True
              |__ path_2
                    |__ True
                        |__ 1.txt
  |__ x_p
        |__ ...
  |__ ...
  .
  .
  .

Expected results:

   __ dst
      |__ report
          |__ 1
              |__ 00000.txt
              |__ 020.txt
              |__ 00000_1.txt
              |__ 020_1.txt
              |__ 10.txt
              |__ 1.txt
  
          |__ 2
              |__ 1.txt
              |__ 2.txt
              |__ 200.txt
              |__ 1_1.txt
              |__ 2_2.txt

---

Update

As @muru answered cp could be handful but there is a constraint in number of argument it can handle through bash (getconf ARG_MAX).

shopt -s globstar
cp --backup=numbered **/True/*.txt dst/report/1/
cp --backup=numbered **/False/*.txt dst/report/2/

So back then, after executing these commands, was getting -bash: /bin/cp: Argument list too long in return.

Again as @muru mentioned in comments, it could be possible to solve this issue via xargs (assuming GNU xargs and cp).

printf "%s\0" **/True/*.txt | xargs -0 cp --backup=numbered -t dst/report/1/

In case of duplicate files with number extension (e.g; bar.txt.~1~, etc) rename would be useful.

prename 's/(.txt).~(\d+)~$/-$2$1/' dst/report/*/*, 

Answer 1

With bash, enable the recursive glob ** with shopt -s globstar and then use **/True/*.txt and **/False/*.txt as patterns, and if you have GNU cp, use the --backups or -b options to avoid overwriting files:

shopt -s globstar
cp --backup=numbered **/True/*.txt dst/report/1/
cp --backup=numbered **/False/*.txt dst/report/2/

Note that cp will add numbering after the extension:

% touch foo.txt
% cp foo.txt bar.txt                   
% cp --backup=numbered foo.txt bar.txt
% ls bar.txt*
bar.txt  bar.txt.~1~
% cp --backup=numbered foo.txt bar.txt
% ls bar.txt*                         
bar.txt  bar.txt.~1~  bar.txt.~2~