搜索多个文件并将它们复制到同一目录中

Question

I'm working on a mac, and have an excel spreadsheet with a list of around 400 file names. They are all on my hard disc somewhere, but could be anywhere within a large archive directory. Ideally I'd like to avoid having to search for each one individually, copy and then paste them into a new directory together in order to do some downstream analysis.

I was thinking there must be some clever way in terminal to grep the file path for a list of file names, then cp those files to a new directory of my choice. I don't really know where to start though. Any help would be much appreciated!

Here's a sample of filenames from my spreadsheet:

E12_JH_260919_E12_2019-09-26_1.fsa
F01_JH_260919_F01_2019-09-26_1.fsa
F02_JH_260919_F02_2019-09-26_1.fsa
F03_JH_260919_F03_2019-09-26_1.fsa
D10_JH_181019.3_D10_2019-10-18_1.fsa
D11_JH_181019.3_D11_2019-10-18_1.fsa
D12_JH_181019.3_D12_2019-10-18_1.fsa
E01_JH_181019.3_E01_2019-10-18_1.fsa
E02_JH_181019.3_E02_2019-10-18_1.fsa
E03_JH_181019.3_E03_2019-10-18_1.fsa

Thanks!

Answer 1

You can use find tool for that purpose. Let's say you have a directory like the following:

~/archive$ tree
├── ASDF.txt
├── destination_folder
├── DFGH.txt
└── spreadsheet.txt

1 directory, 3 files

And a spreadsheet like this:

~/archive$ cat spreadsheet.txt 
ASDF.txt
DFGH.txt

You can read the file line by line, find each file in the current directory, and copy that into another directory:

while read name; do
find . $name -maxdepth 0 -type f -exec cp {} ./destination_folder \;
done < spreadsheet.txt

And the result should look like this:

    ls a
ASDF.txt DFGH.tx