Hi all,

just started out with Linux so I'm unsure if this question goes here but anyway : I have lots of files distributed in a directory tree (in this case having a .java ending) I would like to extract from that tree and put them all into the same destination directory (lets call it "source"). I tried that with copy -R but noticed it would copy all files, and trying copy -R *.java would not find a single file (probably because the pattern does not match any subdirectory names?). I tried using find but failed in getting the files I found to copy to that one destination directory.

Any ideas?

Whizz

Greeeetings!

Try this

Thanks! Works fine! Now however in order to actually learn what I've been doing :

What does {} do? Is this a symbol for the list of files created by find? Does it belong to find (sort of like a variable find will then put each found match in) or is it part of the cp syntax?

What do i need \; for? First time I encounter this combination in a command, is it needed to specify the end of the -exec option? Would just \ or just ; be sufficient? Or do they symbolize different endings (e.g. \ is the end of the first command to execute, and you can give another command after it, and ; is the end of all execute commands)?

Would be great if you could enlighten me there ^.^

Whizz

Might be best if you run the command:man find and have a look under these sections.
ACTIONS
EXAMPLES

Thanks again! That did clear up things, though like all man pages its also quite confusing for someone not knowing the exact workings of a shell . Will be reading up on that a bit I guess ^.^

/Whizz

\ is used to escape a character, since ; is a special character in the shell (to seperate consecutive commands) it needs to be escaped as \;.

Similarly, if you have a folder named "This is a folder", to cd into the folder, the spaces must be escaped,

cd This\ is\ a\ folder

I dont know what the {} does either though. Maybe its in the man? Can't be bothered to look yet