Command to gather all specified text files, rename them, and copy them to a folder

Question

I have thousands of text files called file.txt. Because they all share the same name I cannot move them to the same folder without them overwriting.

I need a command that will locate all of the file.txt files that are within thousands of directories and subdirectories, append the full path name to the end of the file name and then copied to a specified folder leaving the original where it was.

example:

from: file.txt 
to: a/123/file.txt

(i know / cant be used in a file name so hyphens or underscores will work, unless there is a visually more appropriate replacement)

Also, the command would need to ignore case as some are file.txt and some are File.txt as well have an optional 'S' on the end (file.txt or files.txt).

During the renaming, I am hoping the path can be appended as is, without changing case as the directory/subdirectory names are randomized (example: a/adgDGeRddsdvvsdGSD/[fF]ile[s].txt

Thanks!

Answer 1

Using find and a shell script to convert the paths to relative paths to the start directory and replacing / with _:

find . -type f -iname 'file*.txt' -exec sh -c '
    targetdir=$1; shift
    for file; do
        cp "$file" "$targetdir/$(realpath --relative-base=. "$file" | tr '/' '_')"

        # uncomment to restrict the filename to the last 4 directories
        #cp "$file" "$targetdir/$(realpath --relative-base=. "$file" | 
        #   rev | cut -d'/' -f-5 | rev | tr '/' '_')"
    done
' sh /tmp/dest {} +

Replace /tmp/dest with your target directory and cd to the parent directory of your files before running the command.

Example input directory structure:

.
├── dir1
│   ├── file.txt
│   └── sub1
│       └── file.txt
├── dir2
│   └── file.txt
└── file.txt

Output in /tmp/dest:

dir1_file.txt
dir1_sub1_file.txt
dir2_file.txt
file.txt

Answer 2

I would do it like this:

while read -r file; do mv $file /path/to/dir/$(echo $file | tr '/' '_'); done < <(find / -name *.txt -type f 2>/dev/null)

this will loop through all the results of the find command and move them to the desired dir.

If you want to copy them instead you can use the cp command