Copy recursively, omit one subdirectory

Posted this at linuxforums.org, figured I'd cross post it here since you guys tend to answer quicker.

I have a directory on a text only machine that is 17GB that I have to transfer over to another machine. Unfortunately all I have to do it with is a 2GB flash drive. There's one subdirectory inside this directory that is 16GB, so if I could copy all the files/directories except this one it'd make it a lot easier(I could then go through and get only what I needed from it.

So if I've got a directory named "top" and it has ~100 files and ~20 sub directories, one of named "data" that is 16GB. How would I go about copying everything but "data"?

Kind of like this:

Code:

cp -r top -omit /data /mnt/usb/destination

if that makes any sense.
Thanks!

 

Why not just move the huge directory outside, and then copy the original directory
Something like:

Code:

mv top/data .
cp -R top mnt/usb/destination

 

The directories in question are in active use, so I need to keep file structure in place.

I went ahead and copied all the files via cp *.*, then copied each directory separately. It was a bit of a pain but it's done with.

I'm still really interested to know if there's a somewhat simple way of doing this, though.

 

I haven't tested this, but I'd probably do something with a bash one-liner (assuming there no filenames or directories inside top/ with spaces):

Code:

for f in $(find top -maxdepth 1 -name '*'|grep -v '/data');
   do echo cp -av "$f" /mnt/usb/destination/;
done

The 'echo' is there to see what will happen without it actually doing the copying, once I am happy the line resubmitted without the 'echo'.

 

If you are not do know shell scripting, then the following (ugly soln) will work:

Code:

cd /mnt/usb/destination
mkdir data
chmod 000 data
cp  -R xyz/top/* .
chmod 700 data
rmdir data

The copy command will say that permission was denied to copy the contents of data; and it will take a long time (as it will try to copy all 16GB of top, failing for each file).
But it will work

EDIT: the following might be better:
Create a file called data in /mnt/usb/destination, then do the recursive copy. Copy will say it cant overwrite a file with a directory, so it wont access the 16GB of data