How can you move (or copy) all files of a certain type to a directory in Unix?

Question

I'm not very familiar with all the tricks of grep/find/awk/xargs quite yet, so be patient with me =]

I have a particular file type say *.xxx, in random places throughout a certain directory. How can I find all such files, and move them to a folder in my home directory on Unix (that may not exist yet)?

Answer 1

Use find with the exec option, but first create the target folder.

mkdir -p /home/somewhere/else
find /somewhere -iname "*.xxx"

This will list everything that would be moved. Now if you're sure these are the files you want to move, execute the following:

find /somewhere -iname "*.xxx" -exec mv '{}' /home/somewhere/else/ \;

In the exec line, '{}' will be substituted with the actual file name, and it will be moved to the target. Likewise, to copy, just exchange mv with cp. The \; is needed to terminate the command.

If you want a confirmation before each file operation that would overwrite an already existing file, you can add the -i option after mv or cp, respectively.

No need for grep, xargs and their likes. This would unnecessarily complicate things.