Command Line – How to Copy/Move a List of Files to a New Directory

If you want to move or copy all of the files to the same directory, you can use the -t option of cp or mv, but this will mean that you have to type/supply each filename as an argument. It works in the following manner, with as many files as arguments as you like:

cp -t /destination/directory/ file1 file2 file3

or

mv -t /destination/directory/ file1 file2 file3

This is quite laborious, but typing the file names can be made easier using Bash's tab completion.

Alternatively the following bash script will find all the files in a directory, given as the first argument, and copy the selected files into the destination directory, given as the second argument.

It checks each file and asks whether you want to copy that file. At the end of file selection it shows a list of selected files and asks if you want to copy them to the destination directory:

#!/bin/bash
directory=$1
destination=$2
selected_files=()
for f in ${directory}/*
do
  if [[ -f $f ]]
  then
    while true
    do
      read -p "Would you like to copy ${f}? y/n: " choice
      case $choice in
        y|Y) selected_files+=("$f");
             break ;;
        n|N) echo "${f} will not be copied.";
             break ;;
        *) echo "Invalid choice, enter y/n: " ;;
      esac
    done
  fi
done
echo "The following files will be copied to ${destination}."
for file in "${selected_files[@]}"
do
  echo "$file"
done
while true
do
  read -p "Are these the correct files? y/n: " confirm
  case $confirm in
    y|Y) break ;;
    n|N) echo "Exiting filechooser"; exit 1 ;;
    *) echo "Invalid choice, enter y/n: " ;;
  esac
done
cp -t "$destination" "${selected_files[@]}"

Be warned that there's no error checking in this script about whether the destination directory exists, or that you've input the correct arguments.

The error you are getting is because you are reading /trial/file1.txt and not ./trial/file1.txt. That means the shell is trying to find a directory called trial which is under the root directory (/). If you want a path that is relative to your current directory, you can just use:

while read file; do cp "$file" trial/test_folder; done < trial/file1.txt

Or,

while read file; do cp "$file" ./trial/test_folder; done < ./trial/file1.txt

Or, you can use the full path:

while read file; do cp "$file" /home/shane/trial/test_folder; done < /home/shane/trial/file1.txt