Copy directory structure only at year end

Question

Happy New Year. I have a solution to this, but I can't make it work unless I am in the directory I want to copy.

At the end of 2018, I want to copy the directory structure only of various folders named 2018/ into 2019/.

cd 2018/
find . -type d -exec mkdir -p ../2019/{} \;

And this works. How do I do it from the base directory?

find 2018 -type d -exec basename {} \;

gives me the folder names, but

find 2018 -type d -exec mkdir 2019/`basename {}` \;

still copies the 2018 folder into the 2019 folder, and you loose the directory tree.

I can't find a simple answer after multiple searches. Any ideas?

Edit Thanks for all the help and suggestions. This one ultimately worked best for me:

find 2018/* -type d | sed 's/^2018//g' | xargs -I {} mkdir -p 2019"/{}"

Answer 1

This like should do the trick:

for FOLDER in `ls -l 2018/|grep '^d'|awk '{print $9}'`; do mkdir -p 2019/$FOLDER; done

OR

for FOLDER in `find 2018 -type d -exec basename {} \;|grep -v 2018`; do mkdir -p 2019/$FOLDER; done

I hope this helps.

Answer 2

If you have mtree, you can do this:

$ mkdir 2019
$ mtree -cdp 2018 | mtree -Up 2019

If you don't have mtree, here's how to install Archie Cobbs' mtree port from GitHub on Ubuntu 16.04.5 LTS:

$ mkdir work; cd work
$ # adjust this URL to match the desired version from the GitHub page
$ wget https://s3.amazonaws.com/archie-public/mtree-port/mtree-1.0.4.tar.gz
$ tar xf mtree-1.0.4.tar.gz
$ cd mtree-1.0.4
$ cat README
mtree - Utility for creating and verifying file hierarchies

This is a port of the BSD mtree(1) utility.

See INSTALL for installation instructions.

See COPYING for license.

See CHANGES for change history.

Enjoy!

$ cat INSTALL

Simplified instructions:

    1. Ensure you have the following software packages installed:

        libopenssl-devel

    2. ./configure && make && sudo make install

Please see

    https://github.com/archiecobbs/mtree-port

for more information.

$ # I already had openssl installed in my Ubuntu VM, so I forged ahead:
$ ./configure
...
$ make
...
$ sudo make install
$ man mtree
...
$ which mtree
/usr/bin/mtree

I think the OpenSSL package name mentioned by the author may have changed since the instructions were created. On my system, libssl-dev was the package I needed to build mtree with SHA256 etc. support.

HTH,

Jim

Answer 3

Just:

cd 2018/
find * -type d -exec mkdir -p ../2019/{} \;

using the '*' instead of '.' will avoid selecting the 2018 directory itself.

Without cd-ing to directory, I would get the directories list into an array and substitute the year in mkdir command. For example:

# get list into an array, names can have spaces.
IFS=$'\r\n' dirs=($(find /some/path/2018/* -type d))
let i=0
while [ $i -lt ${#dirs[*]} ]; do
  mkdir -p "${dirs[$i]/2018/2019}"
  let i=i+1
done