Move all files with a certain extension from multiple subdirectories into one directory

Question

Suppose I have a bunch of zip files in several directories:

Fol1/Fol2
Fol3
Fol4/Fol5

And I want to move them all to a common base folder. How would I do this?

Answer 1

If you only want to move the .zip files, you could do something like

mkdir ./zipfiles
find . -name "*.zip" -exec mv "{}" ./zipfiles \;

Answer 2

Go to the toplevel directory of the tree containing the zip files (cd …), then run

mv **/*.zip /path/to/single/target/directory

This works out of the box in zsh. If your shell is bash, you'll need to run shopt -s globstar first (you can and should put this command in your ~/.bashrc). If your shell is ksh, you'll need to run set -o globstar first (put it in your ~/.kshrc).

Alternatively, use find, which works everywhere with no special preparation but is more complicated:

find -name '*.zip' -exec mv {} /path/to/single/target/directory \;

If you want to remove empty directories afterwards, in zsh:

rmdir **/*(/^Fod)

In bash or ksh:

rmdir **/*/

and repeat as long as there are empty directories to remove. Alternatively, in any shell

find . -depth -type d -empty -exec rmdir {} \;

Answer 3

If you're using bash version 4 or higher or zsh you can also use recursive globbing:

mv **/*.zip /path/to/move/zip/files/to

This will move ONLY the files and not their relative paths, so collisions might occur.

Answer 4

As a bash hack, you could use the power of tar:

(cd origin/;find . -exec file --mime-type "{}" \;|grep "application/zip"|cut -d ':' -f 1|xargs tar cf -)|(cd target/; tar xf -) && rm -fr origin/

This has the advantage that it does not depend on file extensions, since it uses the file command to choose the files to move and it preserves the directory structure, but it doesn't work with paths containing spaces.

The final rm is there just to remove the original files (becouse @InquilineKea tolds that he doesn't care about the original folder in the comment).

Of course this is particularly suitable if the origin/ and target/ folders are on different disks. Otherwise the other solutions proposed are more efficient (even if they rely on naming conventions, instead of file's content).