Piping output of a 'find' to the 'copy' command?

dcGT

Hi All,
What's the handiest way to copy the resulting files of a 'find' to a specific location.
e.g. I want to

find . -name \*.log

and copy the resulting files to a specific location.

Any help would be great,

Cheers,

DC.

krinDar

henbane wrote:

Is there any reason you can't use > location at the end of the command.

e.g. find . -name \*.log > \home\filename

That will just put the list of filenames into a file called
filename (and your directory separators are backwards).

What is needed is:

find . -name \*.log -exec cp {} /other/directory/  \;

Things to think of are whether there will be any filenames with
the same name, will there be directories that will match the *.log
glob as these could cause problems.

briano

you could use a script some thing like this...

#!/bin/bash

FILES=$(find $1 -name $2 -print)

for file in $FILES
do
$(cp $file $3)
done

where the command would be like "script <place-run-find-from> <name-of-file> <target-dir>"

edit: Just saw krindar's reply, probably easier to do that.

krinDar

leeroybrown wrote:

You could also look into using xargs. If your find results in a very long list of files it will be too big an argument list for cp. The xargs command builds argument lists for other commands thus avoiding this problem.

This should work:

find . -name \*.log -exec xargs cp {} /other/directory/  \;

Xargs is fed from the standard input by default, so that will not work.

When find gets a match it will try and execute the following command
(assume the matching is test.log):
xargs cp test.log /other/directory/

But as xargs is waiting for input it will do nothing.

If you *really* wanted to use xargs you would have to resort to something like
this:

find . -name \*.log | xargs -n 1 -I ARG cp ARG /other/directory

the important arguments to xargs are:
-n 1 : execute utility for each argument/field received.
-I ARG : replace ARG in the utility string (cp ARG /other/directory/) with
the value passed. This is used because the first argument to copy must
be the file you want to copy (the source), the second is the destination.

cp ARG /other/directory : The utility, with ARG being replace by the argument
as passed to xargs.

dcGT

Thanks krinDar... that's exactly what I was looking for!

Cheers,

DC.

zt

find . -name "*.log"|awk '{print "cp " $1 "/other/directory/"}' | sh

albertw

find |cpio -pudvm /output/dir

nadir

I use slocate for searching

dcGT

albertw wrote:

find |cpio -pudvm /output/dir

Thanks albertw.. I'll have to have a look at this one

DC.