How do I flatten a directory structure in Unix?

How about one step further?

I'd like to make a cron job that backs up only the protected iTunes music files in my iTunes directory complete with directory structure. I've tried various cp commands and never can seem to figure it out.

How would you go about doing that?

Thanks for responding!

OK, that looks great, but -print0 is implemented on my Suse 9.1 box just fine (not a Mac!). Also, -J isn't implemented in Suse 9.1, so I'm still stuck.

I'd also add `pwd` to the end so as to not have to hard code the destination so it can be put in a shell script.

Linux also has -print0 in find and -0 in xargs. -J is not in Linux but I guess that --replace can be used instead. The one qustion I have though is why not use

find . -type f -name "*.mp3" -exec cp {} \
/Users/taylor/Desktop/foo

instead of find and xargs?

Good point, Avi, but you ironically demonstrate why I avoid the curly brace notation in find by your mistake: In fact, you need to escape the curly braces AND you need to have an escaped semicolon too for it to work properly, as in:

find . -type f -name "*.mp3" -exec cp \{\} /Users/taylor/Desktop/foo \;

A good solution, though, if you're willing to fiddle around and get the backslashes right. :-)

"I'd like to make a cron job that backs up only the protected iTunes music files in my iTunes directory complete with directory structure."

I don't know what "protected" means in this context, but I'll say that if you want to back up an entire directory structure, you can typically use either cp -R or cpio (use 'man cpio' to see how this useful program works).

Here's the final, working command for linux:

find . -type f -name "*mp3" -print0 | xargs -0 --replace=% mv % `pwd`

Great. Thanks for coming back and completing the loop. I knew that the GNU version of xargs had to have some solution to this.

"Protected" in the context "protected iTunes music files" refers to files of type .m4p, which are AAC files (ordinarily .m4a) that are "protected" with Apple's Playfair DRM wrapper.

Okay, Ken, this is new to me, even though I'm a big fan of my two iPods and iTunes on all my Macs. Are you asking if there's a way to unprotect the files and/or defeat the Playfair DRM?

Um ... how about using the Finder?

In the Finder, File:Find...

Search in: "Specific Places"

Click on "Add" button and choose the foo folder

Search for items whose name ends with .mp3

The select all the results and drag them to foo.

David, I don't think that'll work because he's trying to pull files from lots of different subdirectories at the same time, and even in "list" view the Finder has a tendency to want to move the folders that files are in when you do large multi-directory grabs...

The 'find | xargs' examples should run a lot faster then a 'find ... --exec' operation as you'd have to create one process for each file as opposed to xargs which will make as few processes as possible based on the length of the data on the stdin.

On Solaris I usually will do something like 'find ... | sed -e "s/.*/'&'/g" | xargs ...'. This will wrap each line in single quotes.

Keep up the good tips.

-print0 is a GNU/BSD extension !