Moving all files with same file extension .txt to a new directory

Question

Basically, my hard drive is a mess and I have like 200+ sub-directories in a main directory. I want to essentially move all files in 200+ sub-directories that have the extension .txt etc to a new directory. For example, n00b.txt or n00b.txt.exe

So I try the following command in the main directory consisting of the 200+ subdirectories sudo mv **/*.txt ~/Desktop/tmpremo/

Instead I am getting this error: bash: /usr/bin/sudo: Argument list too long

Why am I getting it and how do I remove say .txt,.txt.exe? How do I fix it?

Answer 1

This would move all files with .txt and .txt.exe extensions present anywhere inside the current directory (even in subdirectories) to ~/Desktop/tmpremo.

$ sudo find . -type f \( -iname '*.txt' -o -iname '*.txt.exe' \) -exec mv {} ~/Desktop/tmpremo \;

If you want another extension too, just add -o -iname '*.extension' before the -exec.

PS: As @xenoid noted, please refrain from using sudo unless it is absolutely required for the task at hand.

Answer 2

(newbie here so I can't comment @BarBar1234's answer)

I believe there's no need to echo the output of 'find', as the command itself already echoes the founded filenames.

So instead you could just use:

sudo find . -type f -iname '*.txt'

But, for the sake of knowledge, the outputs you were getting (find: ‘echo ./rdggt_169/frretcdd_td.txt ’: No such file or directory) happens because in the command

sudo find . -type f -iname '*.txt' -exec 'echo {}'  \;

the part that says -exec 'echo {}' is giving a single-quoted argument to -exec, therefore, it treats the whole expanded string as a command.

To be clear, the string 'echo foo/bar.txt' is not the command echo with a 'foo/bar.txt' argument, that's why nothing was found in your system, because no command exists in your system with the name echo foo/bar.txt.

That's why BarBar1234 just edited the answer, removing the single quotes. Now echo is treated as what is supposed to be treated in this case, a command, not a string.

Answer 3

You are getting the error because **/*.txt is expanded with all the matching files (with full paths) as a very long command line, and there is a limit to the length to the arguments.

A problem with using find ... -exec mv is that you run mv once for each file.

There is a command that will attempt to run commands with the maximum allowed number of arguments: xargs, so you just need to pipe the output of find to xargs and tell xargs to run mv (arguments are by default appended at the end):

find . -type f -name '*.txt' -print0 | xargs -0 mv -t ~/Desktop/tmpremo

PS: I'm surprised that you have to use sudo to move files inside your own user directories.

Answer 4

Since you're already using **, why not do a simple loop?

for name in ./**/*.txt ./**/*.txt.exe; do
    mv "$name" "$HOME/Desktop/tmpremo"
done

The Argument list too long error is due to the shell trying to execute a command with too many/long arguments. This is a limitation in one of the exec() family of C library functions, which has a restriction on the sum of the length of the arguments and the combined size of all environment variables (on Linux, it's slightly more complicated with each argument having a maximum allowed length too I believe, but that's details).

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I can see from your error message that you are using bash, but if you were a zsh user and had GNU mv, you could instead do

autoload -U zargs
zargs -- ./**/*.txt(.) ./**/*.txt.exe(.) -- mv -t "$HOME/Desktop/tmpremo"

The zargs utility is a bit like xargs, but implemented as a loadable zsh shell function. See zargs --help ofter loading it, and the zshcontrib(1) manual.

Answer 5

try this from the top level directory where the subdirectories are located:

sudo find . -type f -iname '*.txt' -exec echo {}  \;

and if the list of files found shows a list of text files in question, do:

sudo find . -path ~/Desktop/tmpremo -prune -o -type f -iname '*.txt' -exec mv {} ~/Desktop/tmpremo/ \;