How to move all the files with the same name scattered through the file system into one folder

command linefilesystemsfind

I have a file system tree and on different locations within it are files with the same name. I tried the following command on the command line:

find / -name "HAHA" -exec mv {} /home \;

It only worked for one file, for the others I received an error message for having the same name.

Can I change the command in a way that for each file name a number will be attached to distinguish them?

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Best Answer

I found a simple solution with a small script. The script is called cpf (or whatever name you give it) and is as follows:

#!/bin/bash

dir=xyz       # Directory where you want the files
num=1

for file in "$@"
do
    base=`basename -- "$file"`
    mv -- "$file" "$dir/$base.$num"
    num=$(($num+1))
done

You execute the command as follows:

find . -name HAHA -print0 | xargs -0x cpf

Related Solutions

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 Command – Missing Argument to -exec

There was several issues with your attempts, including backticks used instead of quotes (removed in later edits to the question), missing quotes where they are required, extra quotes where they are useless, missing parentheses to group -o clauses, and different implementations of findused (see the comments and chat for details).

Anyway, the command can be simplified like this:

find a/folder b/folder -name "*.[ch]" -exec grep -I foobar {} +

or, should you use an archaic GNU find version, this should always work:

find a/folder b/folder -name "*.[ch]" -exec grep -I foobar {} \;

Best Answer

Related Solutions

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

Find Command – Missing Argument to -exec

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