Is it possible to pipe the results of FIND to a COPY command CP?

Question

Is it possible to pipe the results of find to a COPY command cp?

Like this:

find . -iname "*.SomeExt" | cp Destination Directory

Seeking, I always find this kind of formula such as from this post:

find . -name "*.pdf" -type f -exec cp {} ./pdfsfolder \;

This raises some questions:

1. Why cant you just use | pipe? isn't that what its for?
2. Why does everyone recommend the -exec
3. How do I know when to use that (exec) over pipe |?

Solution 1

Good question!

1. why cant you just use | pipe? isn't that what its for?

You can pipe, of course, xargs is done for these cases:

find . -iname "*.SomeExt" | xargs cp Destination_Directory/

2. Why does everyone recommend the -exec

The -exec is good because it provides more control of exactly what you are executing. Whenever you pipe there may be problems with corner cases: file names containing spaces or new lines, etc.

3. how do I know when to use that (exec) over pipe | ?

It is really up to you and there can be many cases. I would use -exec whenever the action to perform is simple. I am not a very good friend of xargs, I tend to prefer an approach in which the find output is provided to a while loop, such as:

while IFS= read -r result
do
    # do things with "$result"
done < <(find ...)

Solution 2

There's a little-used option for cp: -t destination -- see the man page:

find . -iname "*.SomeExt" | xargs cp -t Directory

Solution 3

You can use | like below:

find . -iname "*.SomeExt" | while read line
do
  cp $line DestDir/
done

Answering your questions:

• | can be used to solve this issue. But as seen above, it involves a lot of code. Moreover, | will create two process - one for find and another for cp.

• Instead using exec() inside find will solve the problem in a single process.

Solution 4

Try this:

find . -iname "*.SomeExt" -print0  | xargs -0 cp -t Directory
# ........................^^^^^^^..........^^

In case there is whitespace in filenames.

Solution 5

This SOLVED my problem.

find . -type f | grep '\.pdf' |  while read line 
do
        cp $line REPLACE_WITH_TARGET_DIRECTORY
done

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