I know that this type of questions maybe were duplicated. But in my case, I'm use a variable that contains the destination directory and the error says, that is not a valid directory.
cp target var2 is not a directory
Now, this is my code, I'm trying to copy all images from the folder images (contained in Desktop) to the folder photos (In desktop too and empty). I use GIT Bash for Windows 10
function pause(){
read -p "$*"
}
echo "Help: Use the bar / to separate the directory names"
echo ""
echo "Enter the directory location"
read var1
echo "Enter the destinity directory location"
read var2
for var1 in "var2"
do
cp * var1 var2
done
echo ""
pause "Press [ENTER] to continue..."
What's my mistake? Thanks!
When i execute the script, the directory I use is:
C:/Users/Mauri/Desktop/images
And the var2 is:
C:/Users/Mauri/Desktop/photos
With this code into the for:
cp -r * $var1 $var2
Was moved all archives in the desktop to photos folder, It's not my objetive, I want to move only the images contained on the image folder in the desktop to the empty folder photos in the desktop too.
1 Answer
Instead of your for loop, it would be great if we could run cp "$var1/"*.{jpg,png,gif} "$var2". That would be an easy way to copy all of the files with extension jpg, png, or gif from $var1 into $var2. Unfortunately, that command fails if there happen to be no files with one of the given extensions, for example if we have several jpg files but no gifs.
So we have to make things a little more complicated, and our answer is the find command, as shown below. If you want to add more image file types, just add another set of -o -name '*.EXT' within the parentheses, where EXT is the file extension you want.
function pause(){
read -p "$*"
}
echo "Help: Use the bar / to separate the directory names"
echo ""
echo "Enter the source directory"
read source
echo "Enter the destination directory"
read dest
find $source \( -name '*.jpg' -o -name '*.gif' -o -name '*.jpeg' -o -name '*.png' \) -exec cp -prv {} $dest \;
echo ""
pause "Press [ENTER] to continue..."
The -prv flag on cp means preserve attributes, copy recursively, and use verbose mode (print what has been copied).
