Bash copy all directory with content that matches a pattern - regex

Question

Is there some way to copy the directories including the contents using bash script. For example
// Suppose there are many directory inside Test in c as,
/media/test/
-- en_US
-- file1
-- file 2
-- de_DE
-- file 1
-- SUB-dir1
-- sub file 1
-- file 2
.....
.....
-- Test 1
-- testfile1
-- folder
--- more 1
............
NoW i want to copy all the directories (including sub-directory and files)
to another location which matches the pattern.
--> for example , in above case I want the directories en_US and de_DE to be copied in another
location including sub-directories and files.
So Far I have done/ find out :
1) Needed Pattern as , /b/w{2}_/w{2}/b
2) I can list all the directories as ,
$MYDIR="/media/test/"
DIRS=`ls -l $MYDIR | egrep '^d' | awk '{print $10}'`
for DIR in $DIRS
do
echo ${DIR}
done
Now I need help in combining these together so that the script can copy all the directory(including sub contents) that matches the pattern to another location.
Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

To selectively copy an entire directory structure to a similar directory structure, while filtering the contents, in a general way your best bet is to archive the original directory and unarchive. For instance, using GNU Tar:
$ mkdir destdir
$ tar -c /media/test/{en_US,de_DE} | tar -C destdir -x --strip-components=1
In this example, the /media/test directory structure is partially recreated under destdir, excluding the /media prefix (thanks to --strip-components=1).
The left side tar archives just the directories/paths which match the pattern that we specified. The archive is produced on that command's standard output, which is piped to the decoding tar on the right hand side. The -C tells it to change to the destination directory. It extracts the files there, removing a leading path component.
$ ls destdir
test
$ ls destdir/test
en_US de_DE
Of course, your specific example test case is quite easily handled with cp -a:
$ mkdir destdir
$ cp -a /media/test/{en_US,de_DE} destdir
If the pattern is complicated, involving multiple selections of subtree material at deeper and/or different levels of the source directory hierarchy, then you need the more general approach, if you wish to do the copy in a single batch command which just specifies source patterns.

Answer 2

I'm not sure about your environment, but I guess you try to do this:
cp -r src_dir/??_?? dest_dir

Answer 3

Here is your starter for 10:
You will have to add the extra checks and balances that you require but it should give you a flying start.
#!/bin/bash
# assumes $1 is source to search and $2 to destination to copy to
subdirs=`find $1 -name ??_?? -print`
echo $subdirs
for x in $subdirs
do
echo $x
cp -a $x $2
done

Answer 4

Please check if this is what you wanted. It searches for directories with format xx_yy/ab_cd/&&_$$ (2char_2char) and copies the content to a new directory .
usage : ./script.sh
cat script.sh
#!/bin/bash
MYDIR="/media/test/"
NEWDIRPATH="/media/test_new"
DIRS=`ls -l $MYDIR | grep "^d" | awk '{print $9}'`
for DIR in $DIRS
do
total_characters=`echo $DIR | wc -m`
if [ $total_characters -eq 6 ]; then
has_underscore=`echo "$DIR" | grep "_"`
if [ "$has_underscore" != "" ]; then
echo "${DIR}"
start_string_count=`echo $DIR | awk -F '_' '{print $1}' | wc -m`
end_string_count=`echo $DIR | awk -F '_' '{print $2}' | wc -m`
echo "start_string_count => $start_string_count ; end_string_count => $end_string_count"
if [ $start_string_count -eq 3 ] && [ $end_string_count -eq 3 ]; then
mkdir -p $NEWDIRPATH/"$DIR"_new
cp -r $DIR $NEWDIRPATH/"$DIR"_new
fi
fi
fi
done