How to pipe the results of 'find' to mv in Linux

Question

How do I pipe the results of a 'find' (in Linux) to be moved to a different directory? This is what I have so far.

find ./ -name '*article*' | mv ../backup

but its not yet right (I get an error missing file argument, because I didn't specify a file, because I was trying to get it from the pipe)

Answer 1

find ./ -name '*article*' -exec mv {}  ../backup  \;

OR

find ./ -name '*article*' | xargs -I '{}' mv {} ../backup

Answer 2

xargs is commonly used for this, and mv on Linux has a -t option to facilitate that.

find ./ -name '*article*' | xargs mv -t ../backup

If your find supports -exec ... \+ you could equivalently do

find ./ -name '*article*' -exec mv -t ../backup {}  \+

The -t option is a GNU extension, so it is not portable to systems which do not have GNU coreutils (though every proper Linux I have seen has that, with the possible exception of Busybox). For complete POSIX portability, it's of course possible to roll your own replacement, maybe something like

find ./ -name '*article*' -exec sh -c 'mv "$@" "$0"' ../backup {} \+

where we shamelessly abuse the convenient fact that the first argument after sh -c 'commands' ends up as the "script name" parameter in $0 so that we don't even need to shift it.

Probably see also https://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashFAQ/020

Answer 3

I found this really useful having thousands of files in one folder:

ls -U | head -10000 | egrep '\.png$' | xargs -I '{}' mv {} ./png

To move all pngs in first 10000 files to subfolder png

Answer 4

mv $(find . -name '*article*') ../backup

Answer 5

Here are a few solutions.

find . -type f -newermt "2019-01-01" ! -newermt "2019-05-01" \
    -exec mv {} path \;**

or

find path -type f -newermt "2019-01-01" ! -newermt "2019-05-01" \
    -exec mv {} path \;

or

find /Directory/filebox/ -type f -newermt "2019-01-01" \
    ! -newermt "2019-05-01" -exec mv {} ../filemove/ \;

The backslash + newline is just for legibility; you can equivalently use a single long line.

Answer 6

xargs is your buddy here (When you have multiple actions to take)!

And using it the way I have shown will give great control to you as well.

find ./ -name '*article*' | xargs -n1 sh -c "mv {}  <path/to/target/directory>"

Explanation:

1. -n1

Number of lines to consider for each operation ahead

2. sh -c

The shell command to execute giving it the lines as per previous condition

3. "mv {} /target/path"

The move command will take two arguments-

1) The line(s) from operation 1, i.e. {}, value substitutes automatically

2) The target path for move command, as specified

Note: the "Double Quotes" are specified to allow any number of spaces or arguments for the shell command which receives arguments from xargs