merge folders together

[associates]

Hi,

I would like to move a folder to another folder but I just want to merge the two folders.

For example,
say I have Folder B which has the following files in it
- fileA
- fileB
- fileC

Folder A has the following files in it
- fileA
- fileB
- fileC
- fileD
- fileE

And I want to move folder A to folder B.

The objective here is to ensure that existing fileA, fileB and fileC are not replaced but fileD and fileE are to be copied across.

Is there an easier way to do this in linux?

I am running Ubuntu 10.04.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Thank you in advance

[ptkobe]

"The objective here is to ensure that existing fileA, fileB and fileC are not replaced but fileD and fileE are to be copied across."

If that's really what you want, I can think on a shell script that does a copy file by file depending on file existence at the destination.

You may consider if what you really need is not a synchronization tool. That will
* add non-common files (or optionally deleting them) on both dirs
* replace common based on date

rsync is one of those tools. May not be very easy to use, but very powerful.
Or you may google for synchronization tools

Regards
Luis

[benali72]

Using Nautilus, select all files in Folder A. Then paste them into Folder B. Nautilus will ask you if you want to REPLACE any existing files in Folder B. Answer SKIP ALL and only files with unique names will be copied over. No existing files in Folder B will be replaced.

[kakariko81280]

Hi there,

The man pages for cp point us at the handy-dandy no-clobber flag (-n), which should do what you need.

chris@angua:~/dev/scratch$ ls -l dir*
dir1:
total 0
-rw-r--r-- 1 chris chris 0 2010-12-02 09:59 fileA
-rw-r--r-- 1 chris chris 0 2010-12-02 09:59 fileB
-rw-r--r-- 1 chris chris 0 2010-12-02 09:59 fileC

dir2:
total 20
-rw-r--r-- 1 chris chris 5 2010-12-02 09:59 fileA
-rw-r--r-- 1 chris chris 5 2010-12-02 09:59 fileB
-rw-r--r-- 1 chris chris 5 2010-12-02 09:59 fileC
-rw-r--r-- 1 chris chris 5 2010-12-02 09:59 fileD
-rw-r--r-- 1 chris chris 5 2010-12-02 09:59 fileE
chris@angua:~/dev/scratch$ cp -n ./dir2/* ./dir1/
chris@angua:~/dev/scratch$ ls -l dir*
dir1:
total 8
-rw-r--r-- 1 chris chris 0 2010-12-02 09:59 fileA
-rw-r--r-- 1 chris chris 0 2010-12-02 09:59 fileB
-rw-r--r-- 1 chris chris 0 2010-12-02 09:59 fileC
-rw-r--r-- 1 chris chris 5 2010-12-02 09:59 fileD
-rw-r--r-- 1 chris chris 5 2010-12-02 09:59 fileE

dir2:
total 20
-rw-r--r-- 1 chris chris 5 2010-12-02 09:59 fileA
-rw-r--r-- 1 chris chris 5 2010-12-02 09:59 fileB
-rw-r--r-- 1 chris chris 5 2010-12-02 09:59 fileC
-rw-r--r-- 1 chris chris 5 2010-12-02 09:59 fileD
-rw-r--r-- 1 chris chris 5 2010-12-02 09:59 fileE
chris@angua:~/dev/scratch$

Note that the files in dir1 are zero bytes long and the files is dir2 are five bytes long before the copy.

Let us know how you get on.

[ptkobe]

nice work, kakariko81280

man cp
-n, --no-clobber
do not overwrite an existing file (overrides a previous -i option)

Thanks