Find and copy files
Why does the following does not copy the files to the destination folder?
# find /home/shantanu/processed/ -name '*2011*.xml' -exec cp /home/shantanu/tosend {} \;
cp: omitting directory `/home/shantanu/tosend'
cp: omitting directory `/home/shantanu/tosend'
cp: omitting directory `/home/shantanu/tosend'
If your intent is to copy the found files into /home/shantanu/tosend
, you have the order of the arguments to cp
reversed:
find /home/shantanu/processed/ -name '*2011*.xml' -exec cp "{}" /home/shantanu/tosend \;
Please, note: the find
command use {}
as placeholder for matched file.
i faced an issue something like this...
Actually, in two ways you can process find
command output in copy
command
-
If
find
command's output doesn't contain any space i.e if file name doesn't contain space in it then you can use below mentioned command:Syntax:
find <Path> <Conditions> | xargs cp -t <copy file path>
Example:
find -mtime -1 -type f | xargs cp -t inner/
-
But most of the time our production data files might contain space in it. So most of time below mentioned command is safer:
Syntax:
find <path> <condition> -exec cp '{}' <copy path> \;
Example
find -mtime -1 -type f -exec cp '{}' inner/ \;
In the second example, last part i.e semi-colon is also considered as part of find
command, that should be escaped before press the enter button. Otherwise you will get an error something like this
find: missing argument to `-exec'
In your case, copy command syntax is wrong in order to copy find file into /home/shantanu/tosend
. The following command will work:
find /home/shantanu/processed/ -name '*2011*.xml' -exec cp {} /home/shantanu/tosend \;
You need to use cp -t /home/shantanu/tosend
in order to tell it that the argument is the target directory and not a source. You can then change it to -exec ... +
in order to get cp
to copy as many files as possible at once.