Use xargs to move files from within a directory

Question

I am searching for some folders in my current directory. What I want to do is, move all the files within those directories to another directory. I am using the following command:

find -maxdepth 1 -regex 'myRegexExpHere' | xargs -I file mv file/* Desktop/New\ folder/

But as expected, the '*' is not expanded by xargs, instead searching for a file named * in each folder. What should I do to achieve my aim? Please suggest ways involving the use of xargs only (and not the -exec switch of find), primarily because I have read that using xargs is much more efficient.

Answer 1

You need the expansion of the wildcard to happen in a shell that's executed after file has been replaced by the name of the matching file. So you need to start a shell from xargs.

Better than using xargs, use the exec predicate to find. It's simpler and doesn't suffer from quoting issues.

find -maxdepth 1 -regex 'myRegexExpHere' -exec sh -c 'mv "$0"/* Desktop/New\ folder/' {} \;

You're probably overcomplicating things. This simple use of find can be expressed directly in most shells. Ksh has a syntax for regular expressions:

• @(EXPR1|EXPR2) matches EXPR1 or EXPR2
• *(EXPR) matches 0 or more occurrence of EXPR
• +(EXPR) matches 1 or more occurrence of EXPR
• ?(EXPR) matches 0 or 1 occurrence of EXPR

This syntax is also available in bash if you run shopt -s extglob first, and in zsh if you run setopt ksh_glob first. Then you can use

mv REGEX/* Desktop/New\ folder/

Answer 2

Why use find when you don't need recursion? Use the shell (I'm assuming Bash here, modify to suit your needs) for regex matching:

for dir in */;do
    if [[ "$dir" =~ yourRegexHere ]];then
        mv -- "$dir"/* "Desktop/New folder/"
    fi
done

If your shell's regex capabilities are too weak for your requirements, it doesn't get any better than Perl:

perl -e 'for(grep {/yourRegexHere/} glob "*/"){ 
             qx(mv -- "$_"/* "Desktop/New folder") 
         }'