Any way to sync directory structure when the files are already on both sides?

Question

I have two drives with the same files, but the directory structure is totally different.

Is there any way to 'move' all the files on the destination side so that they match the structure of the source side? With a script perhaps?

For example, drive A has:
/foo/bar/123.txt
/foo/bar/234.txt
/foo/bar/dir/567.txt

Whereas drive B has:
/some/other/path/123.txt
/bar/doo2/wow/234.txt
/bar/doo/567.txt

The files in question are huge (800GB), so I don't want to re-copy them; I just want to sync the structure by creating the necessary directories and moving the files.

I was thinking of a recursive script that would find each source file on the destination, then move it to a matching directory, creating it if necessary. But that's beyond my abilities ...

Any help greatly appreciated!

Thanks

Answer 1

Given that your filenames are unique, this will work, albeit slowly:

#!/bin/sh

src=$1
tgt=$2

# Iterate over all the filenames in the source directory.
(cd $src && find . -type f -print) | while read src_path; do
    src_dir=$(dirname "$src_path")
    src_base=$(basename "$src_path")

    # find the file on the target with the same name.
    tgt_path=$(find $tgt -name "$src_base")

    # skip to next file if there's no matching filename
    # in the target directory.
    [ "$tgt_path" ] || continue

    # create the destination directory and move the file.
    mkdir -p "$tgt/$src_dir"
    mv "$tgt_path" "$tgt/$src_dir"
done

Note that (a) there's not much error checking going on here, (b) this will take a while if you have a lot of files, and (c) as written, this will probably leave a lot of empty directories in the target.

Here's my limited testing. With a source directory that looks like this:

$ find src -type f
src/b/file2.txt
src/a/file1.txt
src/c/file3.txt

And a target directory that looks like this:

$ find tgt -type f
tgt/file1.txt
tgt/file2.txt
tgt/not/the/right/place/file3.txt

If I have the above script in a file called reorg.sh and run it like this:

$ sh reorg.sh src tgt

I end up with a target directory that looks like this:

$ find tgt -type f
tgt/b/file2.txt
tgt/a/file1.txt
tgt/c/file3.txt