Copy all files to another location

Question

I have a folder called "employee" and within that folder there are sub-folders with each employee name.

employee
>> amar
>> akbar
>> anthony

Each of these folders contain 1 or 2 files. There are around 50 employees. I want to copy all those files into a new folder "/home/employee_files" without the sub-folders. In other words, all the files should be available when I list "ls /home/employee_files"

Answer 1

$ cp employee/*/* /home/employee_files/

Answer 2

find /home/attachments/ -type f -exec cp {} /home/attachments_all/ \;

Beware that if two files have the same name, you'll only end up with one of them.

An alternate approach is to copy files to a name that is a hash of their contents.

#!/bin/bash
cp "$1" /home/attachments_all/`sha1sum "$1" | cut -f 1 -d ' '`

That will give you a unique copy of each file regardless of what it was named before. You can alter the script to provide you an index file.

Answer 3

find /home/attachments/ -name "*.*" -exec scp {} /home/attachments_all/ \;