extracting a file from 3000 folders -

Question

I have been searching for a way to resolve this issue but can't find the right way. I have 3000 folders and need to extract a file out of each. It's slightly more complicated than that because of the file path which I have put below.

p:/asset management/planned maintenance/property file/3000 different property folders/06. asbestos/THE FILE I WANT TO EXTRACT.pdf

I have seen solutions to similar problems on here but none seem to fit what I'm trying to do here as they all have a slightly different file structure. They all seem to be C:/music/lots of files/mp3s (for example)

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Cheers,

Pete

Answer 1

If you need to do this only once you might use windows build in file find to get a list, then select them all and copy them. I do not recommend this as a daily task :)

If you have the unix find command you could do some like this:

find p:/asset management/planned maintenance/property file/ -name THE FILE I WANT TO EXTRACT.pdf -exec cp {} p:\Dir_I_want_them_copied_to \;

This makes find look at all files in p:/asset management/planned maintenance/property file
It only selects the files named THE FILE I WANT TO EXTRACT.pdf
-exec is then used to execute a command rather than list the files.

Caveeat: There is a FindUtil for windows package. However I did not test it.