Copy files above 500kB from one directory to another in Ubuntu

Question

hope you can help me, I'm looking for a command to let me copy all files above 500kB in my directory one to directory 2..

Basically I have a lot of Images in directory1 and would like to copy all images larger than 500kB to my other folder directory2..

Do you want to copy, move, or make a link? You probably want to either move or make a (hard) link. Copying is rarely necessary. — William Pursell, Commented Nov 26, 2012 at 19:34
Well, I want to copy, because thats what i want. My folder of images is made by foremost, so I want to keep the collection as a whole untill later... — Qw_freak, Commented Nov 26, 2012 at 22:08
I notice that I am getting some votes down, why is this? Should i have elaborated that I had tried various things with xargs, which did'nt work before asking my question? — Qw_freak, Commented Nov 27, 2012 at 7:38

gniourf_gniourf · Accepted Answer · 2012-11-26 19:35:04Z

6

You can use find thus:

find directory1 -type f -size +500k -exec cp -nv {} directory2/ \;

-v : verbose copy (you see what's copying)
-n : noclobber (might not be available to your cp version): do not overwrite an existing file (just in case).

answered Nov 26, 2012 at 19:35

gniourf_gniourf

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Thanks man, it really helped, I had like a million images ranging from 1kB to 7mB, and 99% of those where >500kB... They where collected by foremost because i acidently deleted an image folder...
– Qw_freak
Commented Nov 26, 2012 at 22:10
Why the Backslash semicolon in the end?
– Qw_freak
Commented Nov 27, 2012 at 7:38
@Qw_freak because for bash, a semicolon is a separation character, so if not escaped, it would not be sent to find. But find needs to have a semicolon to know where the -exec option ends. We must hence escape it.
– gniourf_gniourf
Commented Nov 27, 2012 at 9:49
Use cp --parents to preserve the directory structure.
– holzkohlengrill
Commented Jun 27, 2018 at 11:50
Use --maxdepth 1 to prevent a recursive find. It will only perform the find specifically on the target directory and not subdirectories.
– Liquidgenius
Commented Apr 24, 2021 at 14:46

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sampson-chen · Accepted Answer · 2012-11-26 19:34:47Z

2

This should do it:

find directory1 -type f -size +500k -exec cp {} directory2 \;

answered Nov 26, 2012 at 19:34

sampson-chen

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