How can I use Terminal to copy all files of a certain type from a failing hard drive?

Question

I need to use terminal to copy my Pictures folder from a failing harddrive onto another drive, but I can't actually change into the folder and use just cp *.jpg ~/Documents. Is there a way to do this without having to navigate into the source directory?

Doesn't need to be copy obviously, just whatever that can get my files out of the drive.

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Edit: Found a way around my current problem, so I figured I'd add it. (The answers below did work on other folders, just not on the one I was having problems with. I guess nothing can handle the nightmare that is iPhoto.)

I couldn't see the subfolders of my /Pictures/ directory (and couldn't change the permissions on the folder since the disk is broken). But, using terminal, and

sudo find /Volumes/Olddisk/Users/me/Pictures/ -type d

I got it to print the subfolders (and could probably use the trick in the answers on the individual folders, I guess) so within the mess of iPhoto I found my pictures at

/Volumes/Olddisk/Users/me/Pictures//iPhoto Library/Masters/2010

and just resorted to grabbing each year with

sudo cp -rpv "/Volumes/Olddisk/Users/me/Pictures//iPhoto Library/Masters/2006" ./

Answer 1

Try something like:

find ~/Pictures -iname *.jpg -exec cp {} ~/Documents \;

Answer 2

I use rsync to do this sort of copy

for example

rsync -aE source_dir/*.jpg target_dir

The option E copies the ACLs and a does the unix permissions and times ad recurses down the directoty tree

rsyunc can also be setup to copy to remote machines without mounting drives.

There are some GUI front ends for rsync e.g. aRsync.

Answer 3

cp ~/Documents/somefolder/*.jpg ~/Documents/someotherfolder/