Unix shell file copy flattening folder structure

Question

On the UNIX bash shell (specifically Mac OS X Leopard) what would be the simplest way to copy every file having a specific extension from a folder hierarchy (including subdirectories) to the same destination folder (without subfolders)?

Obviously there is the problem of having duplicates in the source hierarchy. I wouldn't mind if they are overwritten.

Example: I need to copy every .txt file in the following hierarchy

/foo/a.txt
/foo/x.jpg
/foo/bar/a.txt
/foo/bar/c.jpg
/foo/bar/b.txt

To a folder named 'dest' and get:

/dest/a.txt
/dest/b.txt

question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27621/unix-shell-file-copy-flattening-folder-structure

Answer 1

In bash:

find /foo -iname '*.txt' -exec cp {} /dest/ ;

find will find all the files under the path /foo matching the wildcard *.txt, case insensitively (That's what -iname means). For each file, find will execute cp {} /dest/, with the found file in place of {}.