When working on a project last year, I had to migrate and sets of derivative images and associated text files from an internal server to a development server. The project requirements included the retention of the existing folder structure of any folders that contained a few extensions but did not require all of the files contained in the folders. I knew I could use rsync but wanted to see if there were other commands that would achieve the same result.

Using the find command below from the origin directory, I was able to recursively find all folders that contained, the required files. For the example, I’ve only included .jpg and .txt but this could easily be extended. -iname is included to indicate that the extension should be case insensitive.

The simple solution to migrating the files is a unix command on your mac.

CPIO is a utility that archives files and their existing structure.In copy-pass mode, cpio copies files and their folder structure without archiving. The options are described below.

p indicates pass through mode

d makes directories

m preserves modification time

u replaces files unconditionally

Below is the combined find and cpio command which pipes the result of the find to cpio.

Simple, fast one line bash awesomeness.

Check this page for more info about cpio.