Bash: Copy named files recursively, preserving folder structure

Question

I was hoping:

cp -R src/prog.js images/icon.jpg /tmp/package

would yield a symmetrical structure in the destination dir:

/t         


        

Answer 1

rsync's -R option will do what you expect. It's a very feature-rich file copier. For example:

$ rsync -Rv src/prog.js images/icon.jpg /tmp/package/
images/
images/icon.jpg
src/
src/prog.js

sent 197 bytes  received 76 bytes  546.00 bytes/sec
total size is 0  speedup is 0.00

Sample results:

$ find /tmp/package
/tmp/package
/tmp/package/images
/tmp/package/images/icon.jpg
/tmp/package/src
/tmp/package/src/prog.js