Linux bulk file rename/copy

Question

In Linux I have a permanent directory structure which stores 5 different types of files for each month of the year going back to 2005, like so

2005/01/file1 file2 file3 file4 file5

2005/02/file1 file2 file3 file4 file5

...

2015/11/file1 file2 file3 file4 file5

2015/12/file1 file2 file3 file4 file5

I need to replace each instance of file1 from an identical temporary directory structure, except each leaf in the temporary structure only has file1 (file2/3/4/5 do not exist). How can I do one bulk command to rename each file1 to file1.bak in the permanent structure, and then a command to copy each new file1 instance to the proper location in the permanent structure?

You can try rename 1 1.bak 20??/??/file1. Or you can use a for loop. for dir in 20??/??; do mv ${dir}/file1 ${dir}/file1.bak. As for copying to permanent directory, it's just a matter of prefixing the parent directory and using the same logic of the for loop. — alvits

Zak Zak · Accepted Answer · 2016-01-05T21:51:20

I'd first start with the multiple rename -- cd into the root directory you want to search through .. (Above /2015/).

find spec -name "*file1" -exec sh -c 'echo mv "$1" "$(echo "$1" | sed s/file1\$/bak.file1/)"' _ {} \;

Then simply do a mass cp if you are certain the file structures are the same. Lets assume we're working with /var/www/2015/ and /var/www/COPY/ and those two directories are the same structure internally ... then simply

cp -R /var/www/COPY/* /var/www/2015/

Whatever files DON'T EXIST in 2015 that do in COPY will be copied FROM /var/www/COPY/ TO /var/www/2015/ without overwriting existing files (file2, 3 4 5 etc).

Linux bulk file rename/copy

3 Answers