How to move or copy files listed by 'find' command in unix?

Question

I have a list of certain files that I see using the command below, but how can I copy those files listed into another folder, say ~/test?

find . -mtime 1 -exec du -hc {} +

Answer 1

Adding to Eric Jablow's answer, here is a possible solution (it worked for me - linux mint 14 /nadia)

find /path/to/search/ -type f -name "glob-to-find-files" | xargs cp -t /target/path/

You can refer to "How can I use xargs to copy files that have spaces and quotes in their names?" as well.

Answer 2

Actually, you can process the find command output in a copy command in two ways:

1. If the find command's output doesn't contain any space, i.e if the filename doesn't contain a space in it, then you can use:

   Syntax:
       find <Path> <Conditions> | xargs cp -t <copy file path>
   Example:
       find -mtime -1 -type f | xargs cp -t inner/
   

2. But our production data files might contain spaces, so most of time this command is effective:

   Syntax:
      find <path> <condition> -exec cp '{}' <copy path> \;
   
   Example 
      find -mtime -1 -type f -exec cp '{}' inner/ \;
   

In the second example, the last part, the semi-colon is also considered as part of the find command, and should be escaped before pressing Enter. Otherwise you will get an error something like:

find: missing argument to `-exec'

Answer 3

find /PATH/TO/YOUR/FILES -name NAME.EXT -exec cp -rfp {} /DST_DIR \;

Answer 4

If you're using GNU find,

find . -mtime 1 -exec cp -t ~/test/ {} +

This works as well as piping the output into xargs while avoiding the pitfalls of doing so (it handles embedded spaces and newlines without having to use find ... -print0 | xargs -0 ...).