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Hopefully, someone knows the answer to this one: how can I copy folders listed in a file? The list contains the full pathnames of the folders. The folders need to be copied from one location to another. Thanks in advance.
I have my Synology DiskStation share mounted on my Desktop as share. In that share folder is my Viking user folder. On my Desktop is a file named folders.txt, which I have placed a single entry, where the tilde is just shorthand for my home directory, but in your case, multiple folders would still work.
folders.txt
~/Desktop/TestX/Work
Terminal commands
cd ~/Desktop
cp -a $(cat folders.txt) /Volumes/share/Viking
and the result (using the free, third-party tree cmd:
I have my Synology DiskStation share mounted on my Desktop as share. In that share folder is my Viking user folder. On my Desktop is a file named folders.txt, which I have placed a single entry, where the tilde is just shorthand for my home directory, but in your case, multiple folders would still work.
folders.txt
~/Desktop/TestX/Work
Terminal commands
cd ~/Desktop
cp -a $(cat folders.txt) /Volumes/share/Viking
and the result (using the free, third-party tree cmd:
Thomoos wrote:
Hopefully, someone knows the answer to this one: how can I copy folders listed in a file? The list contains the full pathnames of the folders. The folders need to be copied from one location to another. Thanks in advance.
Q -" how can I copy folders listed in a file "
A - What type of FILE is this ?
A - Is it a TextEdit or some other type of text based file ?
Q - " The folders need to be copied from one location to another "
A - As a TXT file is only text of the information , the text can be manipulated like any other text and moved and saved in any location on the computer that is under your control.
The Finder has no clue how to map a list of text file folder paths into a move or copy operation unless one writes some AppleScript. It can be done in the Terminal application with a single command and (some common sense about source and destination content).
Are the source folders and destination folder both on your Mac, or the one or both on a drive mounted to your Mac? Do any of those folders in your list contain a sub-folder hierarchy and do you have the available storage to effect that en masse folder copy without exhausting local storage?
Hi, VikingOSX,
Ab AppleScript: would be great .However, I don't have the skills to write one. Actually, I was thinking about a shell script. Unfortunately I don't possess the skills to do that either.
Source folders: on my Mac.
Destination folder: on a Synology NAS, connected via LAN to my Mac.
Sub-folder hierarchy: yes, and I will create an extra folder to contain the copied folders.a
Available storage without exhausting local storage: yep, checked that already
Hi P. Phillips, the TXT contains the full pathnames of the folders that I need to copy to another location. So I'm looking for some script like BASH or AppleScript that copies the folders listed in the text file.
Hi VikingOSX, I tested your solution on a small scale, and it worked great. I'm still working on the contents of the TXT file containing the folder names. The command I gave was:
find . -name "*.jpg" > list.txt
What I needed was a list of all folders containing one or more .jpg files. Maybe I should pipe it to grep or fgrep to strip the file names, bet I'm not familiar with that.
Anyway, you solved the problem I posted. Many thanks!
It's a flat text file.
... a standard Mac .txt file.
To be honest - suggest following the advise from @VikingOSX as this is beyond my skill set.
The previous person has much more Skill Sets to better help you achieve what you want to do.
How can I copy directories listed in a file?