Need help with shutils.copytree

[Steven W. Orr]

I have a 'master' directory and a collection of 'slave' dirs. I want the 
master to collect all of the stuff in the slave dirs.

The slaves all look like this,

.
|-- slaveX
|   `-- archI
|   |   `-- distJ
|   |   |   ` -- FILE

Where the different slaveX dirs may contain multiple occurrences of archI and 
distJ, but across all slaveX dirs, there will only be one *unique* instance of 
FILE in archI and distJ.

Here's an example: Given slave[1234], arch1 and arch2, and dist1 and dist2, I 
want master to end up looking like this:

.
|-- master
|   `-- arch1
|   |   ` -- dist1
|   |   |    ` -- FILE
|   `-- arch1
|   |   ` -- dist2
|   |   |    ` -- FILE
|   `-- arch2
|   |   ` -- dist1
|   |   |    ` -- FILE
|   `-- arch2
|   |   ` -- dist2
|   |   |    ` -- FILE

etc...


In bash, I might use cpio passthrough mode and say something like:

master=$path_to_master
for slave in ${slaves}
do
     pushd $slave
     find . -print | cpio -pdum $master
     popd
done

but I'm having a hard time trying to get this functionality in python. (I'm 
trying to avoid writing a subprocess.)

I tried using shutil.copytree with a try / except that does a pass on OSError 
(which is what gets raised when trying to create a dir that already exists). 
No joy there. I also tried an ignore function that always returns ().

Someone must have done this before. Any suggestions / pointers are much 
appreciated.

(I hope this was clear to read.)

TIA

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