How can you move (or copy) all files of a certain type to a directory in Unix?

Question

I'm not very familiar with all the tricks of grep/find/awk/xargs quite yet.

I have some files matching a particular pattern, say *.xxx. These files are in random places throughout a certain directory. How can I find all such files, and move them to a folder in my home directory on Unix (that may not exist yet)?

Answer 1

mkdir ~/dst
find source -name "*.xxx" -exec mv -i {} -t ~/dst \;

Answer 2

If you want to move all the files inside a directory hierarchy to a single destination directory, in bash ≥4 (put shopt -s globstar in your ~/.bashrc) or zsh:

mkdir ~/new-directory
mv -i **/*.xxx ~/new-directory

In other shells:

mkdir ~/new-directory
find . -name '*.xxx' -exec mv -i {} ~/new-directory \;

How to read this find command:

• .: traverse the current directory
• -name '*.xxx': act on files whose name matches this pattern
• -exec … \;: perform this command on each file, replacing {} by the path to the file

There's a more complex command using find that's faster if you have many files as it doesn't need to invoke a separate mv process for each file:

find . -name '*.xxx' -exec sh -c 'mv -i "$@" "$0"' ~/new-directory {} +

The + at the end tells find to invoke the command on multiple files at a time. Since find can only put the file names at the end of the command line, and mv needs to have the destination directory last, we use an intermediate shell to rearrange the arguments ("$0" is the first argument to the shell, ~/new-directory, and "$@" are the subsequent arguments coming from find's expansion of {}).

Answer 3

If you want to replicate the directory structure of the matching source files to the new target directory, you can make use of GNU cp's --parents option:

mkdir /path/to/target_dir
cd source_dir
find . -name '*.xxx' -exec cp -iv --parents -t /path/to/target_dir {} +

Answer 4

you can use find without ‍‍-exec‍ as well:

mkdir /path/to/dest    
cp `find /path/to/source -name "*.jar"` /path/to/dest