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linux·LinuxbyGanesh Venugopal

[SOLVED] I need to copy all executable files in my home folder to my documents folder, how can I do this?

[SOLVED]

Bing ChatGPT is THE sh*t man! It got this right in a few secs!!! WOW! Thank you to everyone who answered me, it's due to your help that I was able to solve it through Bing. But holy F, am I impressed with Bing!

I hate MS and I hated bing,BUT they have got something real good here.

find /home/$USER -maxdepth 1 -type f -executable -exec sh -c 'head -n 1 "$1" | grep -q "^#!/bin/bash" && cp "$1" /home/bob/Documents/Linux/Regularly_Copied_files_crontab' sh {} \;

edit: I just want to copy scripts in /home/$USER folder, not all the other subfolders.

edit 2: I think the better approach here would be to have two conditions.

  1. The file is in /home/$USER/ and not in it's subfolders.
  2. The file's first line should be #!/bin/bash

I don't actually need all executable files, I just want my bash scripts, but unfortunately, I don't have the good habit of giving the .sh extensions to all of them. These files are all executable, they all have a shebang line (`#!/bin/bash) as their first line, how can I copy them elsewhere? I mean, I know how the copy commands work, but I don't know if I can specify the pattern here.

How would I specify a cp command to only copy bash scripts to my docs folder?

Intended Use case: I am trying to create a command to copy all the bash scripts I have created in my home folder to my Documents folder. My docs folder is synced everyday, so I won't ever lose my scripts as they would be stored in the cloud.

find ~ -type f -executable

find /home/user -type f -perm /u+x -not -path "/home/user/Documents" -exec cp {} ~/Documents ;

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9 replies

IsoKiero
sopuli.xyz

find /home/user -type f -perm /u+x -not -path "/home/user/Documents" -exec cp {} ~/Documents \;

Run it without exec -parameter to get a list of files affected, I'd guess that that will catch more than you want as it only checks that it's a normal file and has the excecutable -bit on. To get only bash-scripts you'd first need to get a list of files with find and then check if it's a script with something (grep or maybe file should work) and copy based on that result, but it shouldn't be too difficult to write a script for it.

6
Ganesh Venugopalreply
lemmy.ml

One problem, I think it's copying all the files inside folder /home/$USER whereas I just want the bash files which are in /home/$USER exlcluding all the subfolders. The command grep -rl '#!/bin/bash' . | xargs -I {} cp {} /path/to/destination/ won't exclude subfolders.

1
Ganesh Venugopalreply
lemmy.ml

grep -l '#!/bin/bash' . | xargs -I {} cp {} /path/to/destination/

 grep -l '#!/bin/bash' . | xargs -I {} cp {} /home/$USER/Documents/Linux/Regularly_Copied_files_crontab
grep: .: Is a directory

I don't know what's happening here

1
neoney
lemmy.neoney.dev

find ~ -type f -executable

will give you a list of all executable files You can probably use find’s -exec to move them all.

4
Syntheadreply
lemmy.world

This is the right answer. OP got quite the command from Bing 😉

2
hatedbad
lemmy.sdf.org

assuming you have a GNU toolchain you can use the find command like so:

find . -type f -executable -exec sh -c '
case $( file "$1" ) in (*Bourne-Again*) exit 0; esac
exit 1' sh {} \; -print0 | xargs -0 -I{} cp {} target/

This first finds all executable files in the current directory (change the “.” arg in find to search other dirs), uses the file command to test if it’s a bash file, and if it is, pipes the file name to xargs which calls cp on each file.

note: if “target” is inside the search directory you’ll get output from cp that it skipped copying identical files. this is because find will find them a free you copy them so be careful!

note 2: this doesn’t preserve the directory structure of the files, so if your scripts are nested and might have duplicate names, you’ll get errors.

2
lem
lemmy.world

identify

find DIR -executable

copy

find DIR -executable -exec cp {} TARGETDIR \;

1
Ganesh Venugopalreply
lemmy.ml

find DIR -executable

unfortunately, this would list all the executables. I only want the executables in /home/$USER not it's subfolders

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