Linux – Find and Copy Document Files to Another Directory

findlinuxUbuntu

This is a bit of a basic question but I'm trying to copy all .doc files I find in a directory and copy them to another directory.

I know each command:

find -name '*.doc' .

and:

cp filename location

How can I combine the two commands?

find /path/to/search -name "*.doc" -exec cp {} /path/to/copy/to \;

If there are a lot of .doc files this is your best option to avoid hitting the character limit.

Using your file-cut expression to determine the directory name:

find . -type f -exec bash -c 'd="../$(file -b "$1"|cut -d " " -f 1)"; mkdir -p "$d"; cp "$1" "$d" ' none {} \;

d=../$(file -b "$1"|cut -d " " -f 1)

This finds the name of the directory corresponding to the file's type. I added ../ so to put these under the parent directory. You may want to put them somewhere else.
mkdir -p "$d"

This creates the directory if it doesn't already exist.
cp "$1" "$d"

This copies the file to the directory.