Linux: Recursively copy file by file extension, preserving directory structure

Question

At the Linux command line, I'd like to copy a (very large) set of .txt files from one directory (and its subdirectories) to another. I need the directory structure to stay intact, and I need to ignore files except those ending in .txt. Any suggestions appreciated.

Answer 1

You can use find and cpio to do this

cd /top/level/to/copy
find . -name '*.txt' | cpio -pdm /path/to/destdir

Answer 2

how about you first copy it over with

cp -r /old/folder /new/folder

then go to the new folder and run

find . -type f ! -iname "*.txt" -delete

or just

cp -r /old/folder /new/folder && find . -type f ! -iname "*.txt" -delete

Edit: ok you want one command which filters (I have not tested this because my system doesn't have the cpio command!). Here is where I found it: http://www.gnu.org/software/findutils/manual/html_mono/find.html#Copying-A-Subset-of-Files

find . -name "*.txt" |
     cpio -pmd0 /dest-dir

Please test this first, because I haven't tried it yet. If someone would verify, that would be great.

Answer 3

cd /source/path
find -type f -name \*.txt -exec install -D {} /dest/path/{} \;