Bash script to flatten a directory

I just came across an old CD of Fonts that I had purchased before I knew better.
Well I didn’t want to throw the disc out without copying all the fonts to my
system. All the fonts were broken up into directories that corresponded to the
first letter of the name. It seems like there is some Windows software interface
to handle installing the fonts that would make those directories transparent.
Since I didn’t want to have those fonts split up by first letter, I wrote a
little bash script to flatten the directories. All it does is loop through all
the directories in the passed source directory, and copies every non-directory
file to the passed target directory (or . if the argument is omitted).

#!/bin/bash

# Copies files inside nested directories to a single directory. Script does
# not do any checking for existing files, consider yourself warned.
#
# @author Josh Sherman
# @link   http://joshtronic.com

if [ -z "$1" ] then
    echo "Usage: flatten-dir.sh /path/to/nested/directories [ /path/to/target/directory ]"
    exit
else
    NESTED_PATH="$1"
fi

if [ -z "$2" ] then
    TARGET_PATH="."
else
    TARGET_PATH="$2"
fi

for i in `find $NESTED_PATH` do
    if [ -f "$i" ] then
        cp $i $TARGET_PATH
    fi
done

Note: It was pointed out to me that this script doesn’t handle identically
named files inside the directories you are flattening. This wasn’t something I
had to worry about with the fonts CD, but you may need to worry about if you
intend to use this. A couple of solutions would be to prefix the files with the
directory name they came from, or keep a list of the files you’ve already moved,
and if you hit a duplicate append a number to the end, or even prompt for user
input and let them rename it or something. Perhaps in the future I’ll expand
upon this script, but not today my friends.

Bash script to flatten a directory

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