Terminal – How to Use Pipe to mv Command in Unix

command lineterminalunix

I'm trying to move files from Terminal but only those from the results of a grep query.

ls -l | grep -i s02 | mv

What is the best way to complete the command above?

Best Answer

You can accomplish this by just running

cd directory/containing/the/files
mv *[sS]02* /path/to/target/

For more complex operations there is also the option to use find to find all relevant files. The example from your question could also be written as

cd directory/containing/the/files
find . -type f -maxdepth 1 -iname '*s02*' -exec mv {} /path/to/target/directory/ \;

It's worth to have a look at man find to see which other options are available.

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How to correctly pipe output into “say” in terminal

Based on mankoff's answer, this works:

leave +1 2>&1 | while read line ; do echo $line | say ; done

although leave no longer vanishes into the background and lets you carry on typing. Similarly:

leave +1 2>&1 | while read line ; do echo $line | say ; done &

will make it vanish into the background, but will also speak a (harmless) process ID number as well. So neither is quite perfect, but both work.

(I was looking for a solution to:

ping google.com | say

which suffers a similar problem, and someone suggested the above as a solution. I didn't add this as a comment to mankoff's answer because I can't work out how to put spaces and newlines in comments.).

Correct syntax for bash grep function

Nevermind; thought I had tried everything I could imagine; turns out I was just over-zealous with escaping special characters from the shell. The syntax I was looking for is:

gr() { grep -r --include=*.{m,h,xib} "$1" * ; }

Best Answer

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