Just last Episode I was saying how much I like getting to critique other people's command lines, and lo and behold Philipp-- one of our intrepid readers-- sends me this little bit of fu to pick on:
In our company we were just recently talking about finding files according to the user that owns the files and copying/backing them up with the same structure of subdirectories to another directory. We as Linux guys came up with a solution pretty soon:
find . -user myuser -exec cp -a \{\} /path/to/directory \;
I'm not going to pick on this solution too much, since it solves Philipp's problem, but I will note a couple of issues here:
- As find traverses the directory structure, it's going to call "cp -a" on each file and directory. That means a lot of re-copying of the same files and directories over and over again as find descends through various levels in the directory tree.
- It sounds like Philipp only wants to copy files owned by a particular user. But the above solution will also copy files owned by other users if they live under a directory that's owned by the target user
Essentially Philipp's task is to find all files and directories owned by a particular user and replicate that structure in some other directory. And when I hear a task that's "find stuff that matches some set of criteria and copy it someplace else" I think of my little friend cpio:
find . -user myuser -depth | cpio -pd /path/to/directory
This will copy only the files owned by the given user with no extra copying, and the "-d" option to cpio will create directories as needed. So this seems like the most correct, straightforward approach to Philipp's conundrum.
At least for Unix folks, that is. I'll note that Philipp went on to "throw down the gauntlet" at the Windows half of our little team:
But the Windows guys got screwed a bit... So now I wanted to ask you if you know a [Windows] solution and if you want to hare it with me and/or the rest of the world in the blog.
How about it, Tim?
Tim is an original
Sorry to disappoint Hal, but this ain't too hard (even though it may be a bit more verbose).
PS C:\> Get-ChildItem -Recurse | Where-Object { (Get-Acl -Path $_).Owner -eq "mydomain\myuser" } |
Copy-Item -Destination "\SomeDir" -Recurse
We use a recursive directory listing and pipe it into our filter. In the filter the Owner property of the output from the Get-Acl cmdlet is compared against our target user. Any objects (files or directories) that match will be passed down the pipeline. From there the Copy-Item cmdlet does the heavy lifting; it accepts the input object and recursively copys it to the destination.
It should be noted that the same problems explained by Hal occur here as well. I would explain it again here, but I'm not a copy cat.
And for an additional trick, here is the same cmdlet, but shortened.
PS C:\> ls -r | ? { (Get-Acl -Path $_).Owner -eq "mydomain\myuser" } | cp -dest "\SomeDir" -r
So...how `bout that, Hal?