While converting my cvs repositories to git I needed to copy all the changed files from my working directory into a temp directory and then into my git working dir. This was the solution that I came up with:

cvs -qn update -d 2>/dev/null | grep '^[M|\?|P] ' | awk '{print $2}' > files.list
while read file; do cp -r -f --parents "$file" /tmp/dest/; done < files.list

Basically, cvs -qn update -d does a mock update (doesn’t change files), piped to grep to only list the changed files, use awk to exclude the M, P, ? etc, output to a file.

Loop over the lines in the new file using the cp –parents to preserve directory structure