How can I move many files without having Argument list too long?

Question

I am trying to move about 700,000 .jpg files from one directory to another in my Ubuntu server. I tried the following:

xargs mv *  -t /var/www/html/

and

echo (*.jpg|*.png|*.bmp) | xargs mv -t /var/www/html/

and

echo (*.jpg) | xargs mv -t /var/www/html/

and

find . -name "*.jpg" -print0 | xargs mv * ../

and they all give me the same error: /usr/bin/xargs: Argument list too long

what should I do? Please help me out. Thanks :)

Solution 1

If you use find I would recommend you to use the -exec attribute. So your result should be find . -name "*.jpg" -exec mv {} /home/new/location \;.

However I would recommend to check what the find command returns you, replacing the exec part with: -exec ls -lrt {} \;

Solution 2

Try:

find /path/to/old-directory -type f | xargs -i mv "{}" /path/to/new-directory

Solution 3

You could have tried:

 for f in *.jpg do;
   mv -tv $f /var/www/html/
 done
 for f in *.png do;
   mv -tv $f /var/www/html/
 done
 for f in *.bmp do;
   mv -tv $f /var/www/html/
 done

also, you should carefully read xargs(1); I strongly suspect that

 find . -name "*.jpg" -print0 | xargs -n 1000 -I '{}' mv '{}'  ../

should work for you

At last, learn more about rename(1). It is probably enough for the job.

Comments

[Wojciech Jakubas]

On raspberry pi I have played with this command and it started working when semicolon was moved before 'do' keyword so command looked like this: "for f in *.jpg; do mv -f $f /var/www/html/jpgs/; done"