Copy first n files in a different directory

Possible Duplicate:
How to move 100 files from a folder containing thousands?

Is it possible to copy only the first 1000 files from a directory to another?

Thanks in advance

Answers:

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Method 1

The following copies the first 1000 files found in the current directory to $destdir. Though the actual files depend on the output returned by find.

$ find . -maxdepth 1 -type f |head -1000|xargs cp -t "$destdir"

You’ll need the GNU implementation of cp for -t, a GNU-compatible find for -maxdepth. Also note that it assumes that file paths don’t contain blanks, newline, quotes or backslashes (or invalid characters or are longer than 255 bytes with some xargs implementations).

EDIT: To handle file names with spaces, newlines, quotes etc, you may want to use null-terminated lines (assuming a version of head that has the -z option):

find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -print0 | head -z -n 1000 | xargs -0 -r -- cp -t "$destdir" --

Method 2

A pure shell solution (which calls cp several times).

N=1000;
for i in "${srcdir}"/*; do
  [ "$((N--))" = 0 ] && break
  cp -t "${dstdir}" -- "$i"
done

This copies a maximum number of $N files from $srcdir to $dstdir. Files starting with a dot are omitted. (And as far as I know there’s no guaranty that the set of chosen files would even be deterministic.)

Method 3

The following scary 1-liner:

perl -MFile::Copy -e 'opendir(DIR,$ARGV[0]);$n=1000; (-f $_) && copy($_,"$ARGV[1]/$_") while($n-- && readdir(DIR))

works for file containing spaces, quotes, etc., which tend to break shell-based solutions (short of $IFS contortions). ‘Course if your file names are behaved, shell is fine.

Edit: added check for copying only files.

All methods was sourced from stackoverflow.com or stackexchange.com, is licensed under cc by-sa 2.5, cc by-sa 3.0 and cc by-sa 4.0