Linux @lemmy.ml Ganesh Venugopal @lemmy.ml 1 yr. ago

[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.

The file is in /home/$USER/ and not in it's subfolders.
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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14 comments

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.
find ~ -type f -executable

will give you a list of all executable files You can probably use find’s -exec to move them all.
- This is the right answer. OP got quite the command from Bing 😉
grep -rl '#!/bin/bash' . | xargs -I {} cp {} /path/to/destination/
- 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.
  
  Permanently Deleted
Is using another script okay?

#!/bin/bash docs_folder=/some/folder cd files=(*) for f in "${files[@]}"; do [[ "$(cat "$f" | head -n 1)" = '#!/bin/bash' ]] && cp "$f" "$docs_folder/$f" done

It's fucking up the ampersands for some reason.
- It’s fucking up the ampersands for some reason.
  
  it's an unfixed bug. Pretty damning. I am sorry, but I got the answer. Thank you for trying to help me anyway.
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.
find ~/ -type f -maxdepth 1 -exec sh -c 'head -n 1 "$0" | grep -q "^#!/bin/bash$"' {} ; -exec cp {} . ;

i tried and it seemed to work
identify

find DIR -executable

copy

find DIR -executable -exec cp {} TARGETDIR \;
- find DIR -executable
  
  unfortunately, this would list all the executables. I only want the executables in /home/$USER not it's subfolders
  
  https://linux.die.net/man/1/find#:~:text=maxdepth 0 means only apply the tests and actions to the command line arguments.
Combine grep -l to find files with the shebang and cp to copy them to your docs folder. You can one-liner pipe or save the grep results to file and iterate. If the directories are nested and some of these files have the same name, they'll conflict if you don't include most of the original path in the cp target.

If you need them to be executable I think I'd use find first.

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