Use xargs to mv a directory from find results into another directory

Question

I have the following command:

find . -type d -mtime 0 -exec mv {} /path/to/target-dir \\;

This will move the directory founded to another

Answer 1

find ./ -maxdepth 1 -name "some-dir" -type d -print0 | xargs -0r mv -t x/

find: with option -print0, the output will end with '\0';

xargs: with option -0, it will split args by '\0' but whitespace, -r means no-run-if-empty, so you will not get any errors if find didn't get any output. (The -r is a GNU extension.)

I usually use this in scripts when I'm not sure if the target files exist or not.

Answer 2

With BSD xargs (for OS X and FreeBSD), you can use -J which was built for this:

find . -name some_pattern -print0 | xargs -0 -J % mv % target_location

That would move anything matching some_pattern in . to target_location

With GNU xargs (for Linux and Cygwin), use -I instead:

find . -name some_pattern -print0 | xargs -0 -I % mv % target_location

The deprecated -i option of GNU xargs implies -I{} and can be used as follows:

find . -name some_pattern -print0 | xargs -0 -i mv {} target_location

Note that BSD xargs also has a -I option, but that does something else.

Answer 3

find is not really a good tool for this. I imagine you want to move all subdirectories into another directory. find will output things like

./a
./a/b
./a/b/c
./a/b/c/d

After ./a gets moved first, you'll just get errors about 'no such file or directory' all the subdirs.

You should just use mv */ /another/place -- the trailing slash on the wildcard restricts the expansion to only dirs.

Answer 4

If you've got GNU mv (and find and xargs), you can use the -t option to mv (and -print0 for find and -0 for xargs):

find . -type d -mtime -0 -print0 | xargs -0 mv -t /path/to/target-dir

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Note that modern versions of find (compatible with POSIX 2008) support + in place of ; and behave roughly the same as xargs without using xargs:

find . -type d -mtime -0 -exec mv -t /path/to/target-dir {} +

This makes find group convenient numbers of file (directory) names into a single invocation of the program. You don't have the level of control over the numbers of arguments passed to mv that xargs provides, but you seldom actually need that anyway. This still hinges on the -t option to GNU mv.

Answer 5

If you are not using GNU mv, you can use that command:

find . -depth -type d -mtime 0 -exec bash -c 'declare -a array;j=1;for i; do array[$j]="$i"; j=$((j+1));done; mv "${array[*]}" /path/to/target-dir' arg0 {} +

otherwise, here is a simpler solution that doesn't require xargs:

find . -depth -type d -mtime 0 -exec mv -t /path/to/target-dir {} +

Note that I added -depth otherwise you'll have errors when both a directory and one of its subdirectory is to be processed.