How to emulate cp and mv --parent on osx

Question

Osx mv and cp does not have the --parents option, so how does one emulate it ?

I.e. mv x/y/a.txt s/x/y/a.txt when s is empty gives a no directory found error unless one does a mkdir first which is rather cumbersome when trying to do this did thousands of files.

Answer 1

The solution (which works on all platforms that has an rsync) is:

Use find or some other tool to create a file with the files you want moved/copied, i.e.

find *.mp3 > files.txt

Then use rsync files-from to specify it and by using --remove-source-files it behaves like a mv -p and without it works like cp -p:

rsync --files-from=files.txt --remove-source-files src dest 

Slower than a native mv/cp but its resumable and rsync got alot more options that can otherwise help too for cleaning up your files.