Commands using cp

If like me you do a lot of front-end coding and you have a lot of clients that asks you some little modifications, then you send the modifications back to them in a zip file while ignoring the .git folder and .gitignore file, then copy this zip into your dropbox and send it back to them. They find out a new bug so, rince and repeat? You get the picture. It can be quite tedious.

Installs busybox to an obscure directory on the HTC evo

/data/wimax/login/bin

copy some file from xx.m3u to target folder

Useful for Maven multimodule projects, where you want to extract all packaged jar files.

Use if you have pictures all over the place and you want to copy them to a central location

Synopsis:

Find jpg files

translate all file names to lowercase

backup existing, don't overwrite, preserve mode ownership and timestamps

copy to a central location

In other way of xargs, only with find -exec

Today I needed to choose an icon for an app. My simpler way: put all of /usr/share/icons in myicons folder and brows'em with nautilus. Then rm -r 'ed the entire dir.

This command copies all filenames in the current dir and subdirs that end in .mp3 regardless of case (also matches .MP3 .mP3 and .Mp3)

It copies all the files to the "mp3" folder in your home directory.

If you want to see the files that are beeing copied, replace "cp {}" with "cp -v {}"

No problem with word splitting. That should works on many Unix likes.

I used this command to recursively gather all mp3 files that were previously imported into their own directories (sorted by band name) in Songbird.

This script creates date based backups of the files. It copies the files to the same place the original ones are but with an additional extension that is the timestamp of the copy on the following format: YearMonthDay-HourMinuteSecond

"&&" runs sed if and only if the backup completed and /bin/cp exited cleanly. Works for multiple files; just specify multiple filenames (or glob). Use -v switch for cp to play it safe.

cp options:

-p will preserve the file mode, ownership, and timestamps

-r will copy files recursively

also, if you want to keep symlinks in addition to the above: use the -a/--archive option

I used this to copy all PDFs recursively to a selected dir

It will create a backup of the filename. The advantage is that if you list the folder the backups will be sorted by date. The command works on any unix in bash.

You could start this one with

BUT using the find with "-type f" ensures you only get files not any dirs you might have

It'll also create backups of the files it's overwriting

Of course, this assumes that you don't have any files with duplicated filenames in your target structure

To check if the table-of-content in a LaTeX document is up-to-date, copy it to a backup before running LaTeX and compare the new .toc to the backup. If they are identical, it is updated. If not, you need to run LaTeX again.

less symbols, tab completion.

including # export SIMPLE_BACKUP_SUFFIX="_`date +%F`" in your .bashrc provides you to easily timestamp your files

search the newest *.jpg in the directory an make a copy to newest.jpg. Just change the extension to search other files. This is usefull eg. if your webcam saves all pictures in a folder and you like the put the last one on your homepage. This works even in a directory with 10000 pictures.