Finding all .cpp and .h files and moving them to ~/junk

find

I created a folder on my home directory call junk, and let's say I want to move all .cpp and .h files to it. How would I do it? My first thought is to start with find ~ -name *.cpp -print, but I don't know how to put in multiple patterns into the find argument, and I'm fairly lost after that.

Best Answer

portably:

cd &&
  find . -path ./junk -prune -o -type f \( \
    -name '*.h' -o -name '*.cpp' \) -exec sh -c '
      exec mv -i "$@" junk' sh {} +

Above excluding the junk folder itself from the search.

We're only removing regular files (-type f). There may be other types of files you want to move like symlinks, but beware that moving symlinks often break them.

The -i is a safeguard to avoid two files with the same name overriding each other.

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Find – How to Move or Copy All Files to a Directory with the Same Filename Prefix

It would be a hell to tell find what to do in this case.

Better use the shell:

for i in **/*.{xrt,ini,moo}; do
  FILE=$(basename "$i")
  DIR=~/dst/${FILE%.*}
  echo mkdir -p -- "$DIR"
  echo mv -i -t "$DIR" -- "$i"
done

Use shopt -s globstar to make the ** glob work (or use zsh!). And remove the echos later if the command prints what you want.

Find files based on name and moving them with renaming simultaneously

Perl module Unicode::Tussle comes with a very useful script named rename (which is unfortunate, because the name clashes with the standard rename(1) on Linux). With it, you could do something like this:

mkdir xyz
find . -name '*.pdf' -print0 | \
    rename -0 's!^\.!xyz!;  s!/[^/]*\.pdf$!.pdf!'

Without Perl, you could still do the same thing with a bit of shell plumbing:

mkdir xyz
find . -name '*.pdf' | sed 's/^/mv /' >src
find . -name '*.pdf' | sed 's!^\./!xyz/!; s!/[^/]*\.pdf$!.pdf!' >dest
join src dest | sh -
rm -f src dest

And, as I'm sure other people will be quick to point out, you can even put it on a single line, using <(...) process substitution. I'm not sure that would make things more legible though. Computers these days are powerful enough to allow a more verbose syntax. ;)

Best Answer

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Find – How to Move or Copy All Files to a Directory with the Same Filename Prefix

Find files based on name and moving them with renaming simultaneously

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