thinkMoult » bash http://thinkmoult.com Seriously who ever reads this description. Sun, 22 Jan 2012 04:58:16 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 Tech tip #4: Copy a random set of files from a directory. http://thinkmoult.com/2010/01/12/tech-tip-4-copy-a-random-set-of-files-from-a-directory/ http://thinkmoult.com/2010/01/12/tech-tip-4-copy-a-random-set-of-files-from-a-directory/#comments Tue, 12 Jan 2010 03:15:25 +0000 Dion Moult http://thinkmoult.com/2010/01/12/tech-tip-4-copy-a-random-set-of-files-from-a-directory/ More for archival purposes than anything, today I wanted to copy some songs out of my serious mess of a music "collection" onto my microSD card. I didn’t want to have to choose and I haven’t rated my songs so that wouldn’t help. Instead I wanted a random selection of songs. I’m not a bashmaster (absolutely pathetic at it, actually) but this is what I ended up using – after symlinking all of the various directories I had my files under together:

find -L /home/drive/music -type f -name "*.mp3" | sort -R | tail -n100 | while read file; do cp "$file" /media/disk/music/; done

-n100 represents how many files are going to be copied. Hope it helps somebody! Of course any improvements are welcome.

No related posts.

]]> http://thinkmoult.com/2010/01/12/tech-tip-4-copy-a-random-set-of-files-from-a-directory/feed/ 7