Bash: Copy files with list of excluded files.

gistfile1.txt

Say you need to copy files in a folder to somewhere else, except that you have a list of files that might be exist in the source folder but you don't want them to be copied. Your text file that has this list is named list.txt:
------------------------
exclude1.mp3
dont_copy.mpeg
nyancat.jpg
------------------------

$ cd source/
$ cat /path/to/list.txt | tr '\n' '#' | sed 's/.$//g' | sed 's/#/\\\\|/g' | xargs -i sh -c "ls | grep -v '{}'" | xargs -i cp -v -u {} /path/to/dest/

This will copy all files in the source/ except those files in the list.txt, if the file is already exist in the /past/to/dest/, it will be ignored (-u).

It's simply printing the list.txt, changing all line breaks to #, and remove the trailing #, and then change # to a regex of OR (\|), and do `ls` and inverse grep with the list of excluded files, and copy the non-excluded files to /path/to/dest.