3

I have a portable disk with contents like this:

/media/usb1/CBCradio3/1.wav
/media/usb1/CBCradio3/2.wav
/media/usb1/CBCradio3/3.wav
/media/usb1/CBCradio3/4.wav
/media/usb1/podcasts/1.wav
/media/usb1/podcasts/2.wav
/media/usb1/podcasts/3.wav

And a hard drive with contents like this:

/home/user/Music/CBCradio3/2.wav
/home/user/Music/CBCradio3/3.wav
/home/user/Music/radio12/1.wav
/home/user/Music/radio12/2.wav

I want to copy the data over, however, if a foldername inside /Music/ already exists, it should ignore it.

In other words, I don't want folders to end up with mixed data. If I use regular copy to copy over the drive, I end up with content like this:

/home/user/Music/CBCradio3/1.wav <--added to folder
/home/user/Music/CBCradio3/2.wav
/home/user/Music/CBCradio3/3.wav
/home/user/Music/CBCradio3/4.wav <--added to folder
/home/user/Music/podcasts/1.wav <--added whole folder
/home/user/Music/podcasts/2.wav <--added whole folder
/home/user/Music/podcasts/3.wav <--added whole folder
/home/user/Music/radio12/1.wav
/home/user/Music/radio12/2.wav

But I don't want it to merge content, if a folder exists, it should skip copying content. How can I achieve this?

  • I tried copying in mc and thunar but it merges folder contents.
  • The directories below .../usb1/ do not contain further sub-directories.
AdminBee
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Village
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2 Answers2

5

Going by your description, this is not a recursive problem: if foo exists both in the source and the destination, then foo will not be copied, end of story. Therefore a simple shell loop solves the problem.

source=/media/usb1
destination=/home/user/Music
test -d "$destination" || mkdir -- "$destination"
for x in "$source"/*; do
  if ! [ -e "$destination/$x" ]; then
    cp -Rdp "$x" "$destination/"
  fi
done

(But note that the requirement is problematic. For example, if a copy is interrupted, you'll end up with a partial directory in the destination and no way to resume, or even to know that there's something to resume.)

Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
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0

Sometimes it is not very convenient to use tools such as rsync or others, if you need to have a look first to select/deselect some of the files before copying them over (or not)

So you may want to use a text-console "graphical" tool that will show you both directories and allow you to compare their content, and will allow to "synchronize" them.

For exemple: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Commander

It has many capabilities, including the one you may want to try:

Directory compare: Directories (all or only selected) can be compared and synchronized both symmetrically (two-way) and asymmetrically (one-way). This feature shows differences between two locations by directory and subdirectory, and can make a fully automatic backup of files that have been added, changed or deleted.

A variant as a text-only (inside your terminal) interface would be the old but still being updated until this year : mc, aka https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midnight_Commander. The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_managers shows that it also can : synchronize directories, now. Highly recommended to give it a try, as the ability to move around with just keypresses makes it a breeze.

Of course those tools make interruption & restarting later on very easy, as the next comparison will be fresh.

Olivier Dulac
  • 6,285