Copy MP4 files from direcotry tree (-R) to a single directory

Question

I have a bunch of MP4 videos in a directory tree (by category), and I want to recursively copy them all to a single directory on another drive. I tried:

cp -R -p -f /hdd1mnt/Videos/*.mp4 /hdd2mnt/

But it just copies the few files in the /hddname/Videos/ directory and doesn't copy any of them from sub-directories under that. I've tried a few variations, but they all give the same result- no recursion. Please steer me right!

Thanks, Bill

Does this answer your question? [Recursively copy files from one directory to another](https://askubuntu.com/questions/802238/recursively-copy-files-from-one-directory-to-another) — Maythux, Jan 17 '20 at 09:17

Broadsworde · Accepted Answer · 2020-01-17T17:32:31.723

0

Using The find Command

find: Search for files in a directory hierarchy

Generic:

find [sourcePath] -name ‘[filename]’ -exec cp {} [targetPath] \;

Your Example:

find /hdd1mnt/Videos/ -name '*.mp4' -exec cp {} /hdd2mnt/ \;

Replace -name with -iname to ignore case.

edited Jan 17 '20 at 17:32

answered Jan 17 '20 at 06:25

Broadsworde

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THANK YOU! That does it perfectly. I'm going to put this in my web pages for future reference. – lunix Jan 17 '20 at 06:39

Copy MP4 files from direcotry tree (-R) to a single directory

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