How to copy a list of directories (and their contents - subdirectories and files) into a different folder?

Question

Let's say I have 7000+ directories somewhere, each of which contains subdirectories and some files. I am only interested in a small proportion (maybe 700+) of the 7k+ directories, and I have the names of these directories. I want to copy only the 700+ directories together with their contents to a new location. How can I do that? Thanks a lot in advance!

Answer 1

The answer to this depends entirely upon how you have formatted your your list of directories, mostly depending upon the delimiter. Assuming it is a file seperated by newlines: cat directories.txt | while read line; do mv $line /path/to/destination; done

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