File copy with filter

Question

How can I copy all files with a certain extension from one location to another?

For example, I want to copy all my music files onto my mp3 player, but my music folder on my hard drive contains cover art as well as music. I am aware that I could just copy everything across and then delete all the images, but I am hoping for a better solution than that. I have seen a solution using rsync, like

rsync -av --exclude "*/" --include "*.mp3" --include "*.ogg" --include "*.wma" --include "*.flac" ~/Music/. /media/E100/Music

but this complains lots about not being able to change the group of the files, and for some reason didn't copy all the files over (it left some directories blank). Also, I would prefer that the creation date on the files is the current time, since this would probably work better with the mp3 player's internal database.

Other things that I would really like: It would be nice if it doesn't overwrite the files, but only copies the latest files over, however, if I have to erase all the files and then copy the whole directory across, I can handle that as well.

Answer 1

It sounds like you've already got the solution you want with rsync.

If it's complaining about permissions and unable to copy certain things, try running it with sudo

sudo rsync -auv etc etc

EDIT: The -a flag is what is causing it to preserve times. The -a flag is an alias for -rlptgoD and the -t flag is what causes the times to be preserved. You may prefer to use rsync like this:

sudo rsync -rlpgoDuv etc etc

also: for particularly long copies, you may want to use the --progress flag rather than -v.

---

Seems this works:

sudo rsync -rlpuv --progress --include "*/" --include "*.mp3" --include "*.ogg" --include "*.wma" --include "*.flac" --exclude "*" ~/Music/ /media/E100/Music