December 14, 2015

In a project folder, what is the easiest way to copy a batch of files (with a common prefix / suffix) into another directory?

Consider this example: Suppose we have the following files stored in multiple folders:

20151214a/test01.txt

20151214b/test02.txt

20151214c/test03.txt

...

20151214z/test26.txt

We want to copy those 26 text files into a single folder "build"; at the same time, we want to rename them to:

build/01.txt

build/02.txt

...

build/26.txt

In a Makefile, we can do

for file in 20151214*/test*.txt; do

cp -a "$file" build/${file#*/test}

done

The pattern ${file#*/test} removes the prefix "test" in all the matched files.