UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi,

I want to copy files from a unknown sub-folder to other sub-folder without copying the sub-folder. I tried the command:

find . -name Results*.pdf | cp *.* /home/dario/Desktop/

but i always copy the subfolder.

Can anybody help?

"cp" doesn't read from pipe, so the find is useless. What you're doing just amounts to cp *.* /home/dario/Desktop/

Try cp Results*.pdf /home/dario/Desktop/

Or if you're trying to find Results*.pdf in many subdirectories:
find ./ -print0 -name 'Results*.pdf' | xargs --null tar -cf - | tar -C /home/dario/Desktop -xf -

What this does is stuff every file into a TAR archive, and simultaneously extract the tar onto your desktop. This preserves the directories they're found in.

xargs converts pipes into arguments. "echo a b c d | xargs cat y" amounts to "cat y a b c d".

The -print0 and --null are necessary to prevent xargs from choking on filenames and paths with spaces.

By the way: *.* is a DOS-ism, UNIX doesn't have fixed file extensions like that. *.* would match a file named "file.name" but would not match a file named "filename", since it wouldn't find the dot. If you want to really match everything, just * by itself will do.

The command copies all the sub-folders. I just want to copy pdf files inside the sub-folders and not the sub-folders

Are you sure? What if some of them have the same name? They couldn't all exist in the same directory.

cp isn't capable of creating directories unless you gave it the -R parameter, so that can't be all of what you actually typed.

If you're absolutely positive there's no duplicate names:

Code:

find ./ -name 'Result*.pdf' | while read FILE ; do cp "$FILE" /home/dario/Desktop/ ; done

I'm sure. And even if there are any files with the same name, I'm absolutely sure that they are the copy of the same file. That command worked perfectly. Thanks

Code:

find . -name 'Result*.pdf' -type f -exec cp {} /home/dario/Desktop/ \;