Mac Terminal - moving files

Question

I am trying to use Mac Terminal command to move files to a new location.

I have a list of almost 2000 filenames with full paths in a text file. (All of them are in one parent directory, but distributed within multiple sub-directories.) I want to move these files into a single folder outside the parent directory.

How do I do this? I need the command to do something like this:

mv 'files listed in abc.txt' to destination

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

You could do something like create a tar file using your text file as an include file, then untar the file in the new location.

Or a one liner like this might work

while read -r i; do mv "$i" "/new/path/$i" ; done < abc.txt

Answer 2

Here is an example that doesn't require creating a temporary file first, and will work on all possible filenames:

for f in /parentdirectory/*; do
    if grep -q 'keyword' "$f"; then
        mv "$f" /someotherdir
    fi
done

Answer 3

I tested this in debian for a list in which there was one file path per line

  cat list.txt | xargs mv -R -t copy_to_this_directory