Copy specific subfolders on linux

Question

I have similar file sturecture:

/home/dave/documents/static/
/home/static/
/home/dave/pictures/static/
/home/dave/otherfolders/
...

I want to copy from this directory only folders named static. These folders can be also subfolders. And it should form the same structure in new folder it had before. I.e.:

cp -r /home/* /otherhome/

I've tried this:

find home/ -name 'static' -exec cp -r '{}/*' 'otherhome/{}' ';'

But I get errors that /home/dave/documents/static/* and other static folders don't exist. I guess I can't concat the filenames with /*. Any idea how to do it?

Answer 1

The problem is that those directories do not exist when you try to copy them over. You'd have to make them first.

find home -type d -name 'static' -print0 | while IFS= read -rd '' dir; do 
    newdir="${dir#home/}"
    mkdir -p otherhome/"$newdir"   
    cp -R "$dir" otherhome/"${newdir%static}"
done

We need to strip the home/ from the original directory names and then create the new folder hierarchy (mkdir -p). Then we copy over the contents recursively, but we also need to strip static from the end of the new directory so as not to create static/static.

There might be a prettier way to achieve this.

Example before and after:

.
├── home
│   ├── dave
│   │   ├── documents
│   │   │   └── static
│   │   │       └── Untitled.txt
│   │   ├── otherfolders
│   │   └── pictures
│   │       └── static
│   │           └── Untitled2.txt
│   └── static
└── otherhome
    ├── dave
    │   ├── documents
    │   │   └── static
    │   │       └── Untitled.txt
    │   └── pictures
    │       └── static
    │           └── Untitled2.txt
    └── static