copying files with same name

[Erik Trulsson]

On Mon, Feb 16, 2004 at 04:49:37PM -0500, Dru wrote:
> 
> Okay, I must be missing something obvious here. How do you do a batch copy
> while renaming the destination files? I want to copy all of the configure
> scripts in /usr/ports to ~/scripts. I can get find to find the files, I
> can get sed to rename them, but I can't get the timing down right.
> 
> cp -v `find /usr/ports -name configure -print | sed 's:/:=:g'` .
> 
> renames the files nicely (so they're not all named configure), but does it
> too soon--the source no longer exists.
> 
> cp -v `find /usr/ports -name configure -print -exec sed 's:/:=:g' {} \;` .
> 
> gives a syntax error (missing }) and
> 
> cp -v `find /usr/ports -name configure -print | sed 's:/:=:g'` .
> 
> has sed complain of extra characters at the end of a p command, followed
> by all my destination files being named configure.
> 
> Is there a way to do this as a one-liner, or does one have to write a
> shell script with a while loop?

First you should note that there are two ways of using cp(1).
The first one is of teh form 'cp src-file dst-file'  and the second one
is of the form 'cp src-file1 src-file2 src-file3 ...  dstdir'
So if you don't want the dest-file to have the same name as the source,
you must invoke cp(1) once for each file.

You will have to use some kind of loop to do this. A for loop iterating
over the output of find(1) would seem to be better suited for this
problem than a while loop.



-- 
<Insert your favourite quote here.>
Erik Trulsson
ertr1013 at student.uu.se