How can I use xargs to copy files that have spaces and quotes in their names?

Question

I\'m trying to copy a bunch of files below a directory and a number of the files have spaces and single-quotes in their names. When I try to string together find

Answer 1

With Bash (not POSIX) you can use process substitution to get the current line inside a variable. This enables you to use quotes to escape special characters:

while read line ; do cp "$line" ~/bar ; done < <(find . | grep foo)

Answer 2

Frame challenge — you're asking how to use xargs. The answer is: you don't use xargs, because you don't need it.

The comment by user80168 describes a way to do this directly with cp, without calling cp for every file:

find . -name '*FooBar*' -exec cp -t /tmp -- {} +

This works because:

• the cp -t flag allows to give the target directory near the beginning of cp, rather than near the end. From man cp:

   -t, --target-directory=DIRECTORY
         copy all SOURCE arguments into DIRECTORY

• The -- flag tells cp to interpret everything after as a filename, not a flag, so files starting with - or -- do not confuse cp; you still need this because the -/-- characters are interpreted by cp, whereas any other special characters are interpreted by the shell.

• The find -exec command {} + variant essentially does the same as xargs. From man find:

   -exec command {} +                                                     
         This  variant  of the -exec action runs the specified command on
         the selected files, but the command line is built  by  appending
         each  selected file name at the end; the total number of invoca‐
         matched  files.   The command line is built in much the same way
         that xargs builds its command lines.  Only one instance of  `{}'
         is  allowed  within the command, and (when find is being invoked
         from a shell) it should be quoted (for example, '{}') to protect
         it  from  interpretation  by shells.  The command is executed in
         the starting directory.  If any invocation  returns  a  non-zero
         value  as exit status, then find returns a non-zero exit status.
         If find encounters an error, this can sometimes cause an immedi‐
         ate  exit, so some pending commands may not be run at all.  This
         variant of -exec always returns true.

By using this in find directly, this avoids the need of a pipe or a shell invocation, such that you don't need to worry about any nasty characters in filenames.

Answer 3

For those who relies on commands, other than find, eg ls:

find . | grep "FooBar" | tr \\n \\0 | xargs -0 -I{} cp "{}" ~/foo/bar

Answer 4

This is more efficient as it does not run "cp" multiple times:

find -name '*FooBar*' -print0 | xargs -0 cp -t ~/foo/bar

Answer 5

You might need to grep Foobar directory like:

find . -name "file.ext"| grep "FooBar" | xargs -i cp -p "{}" .

Answer 6

bill_starr's Perl version won't work well for embedded newlines (only copes with spaces). For those on e.g. Solaris where you don't have the GNU tools, a more complete version might be (using sed)...

find -type f | sed 's/./\\&/g' | xargs grep string_to_find

adjust the find and grep arguments or other commands as you require, but the sed will fix your embedded newlines/spaces/tabs.